One Way Open Is Not Enough

Dave Winer celebrates Facebook opening up a bit more.

Me too.

As Dave said, I believe that there is no viable "winner takes all" strategy on the web. The web is the winner that takes all. Anyone trying to get all the users on a single platform forgets that they already are.

So while I am thrilled that I can now get my Facebook status message into Twitter and subscribe to my friend’s Facebook posts in Google Reader, that’s not enough for my taste.

I want to use Twitter to update my Facebook status. I don’t update my Facebook status. I twitter it to my blog, my friends phones, and countless other places on the web. I hope that Facebook will be another of those places soon.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Dave

    That’s the only way Twitter will survive if Facebook opens up and allows Twitter to be the carrier of status messages. Without doing this, Twitter is dead.

  2. Rick Burnes

    I’m surprised everybody is so excited about this. Yesterday’s changes seem less about opening up than helping people deal with notification spam by changing the delivery mechanism format from e-mail to RSS.For me, the most important data on Facebook is the News Feed. If Facebook really wants to open up, they’ll let me read my News Feed in the same application I read all my other feeds — Google Reader.

  3. Robert Dewey

    I don’t think Twitter is dead without Facebook. I confess, I don’t use Twitter… but I could see a use for it in the enterprise software-as-a-service game where fast updates are critical. Then again, RSS is expected to fill that gap… but I think Twitter has better mobility. Nothing like hopping on your phone and Twittering “meeting at 5” to your colleagues.

  4. Isaac

    Maybe OpenID can solve all the problem, dual-openess. Another question, once you have twitter, why don’t you still need facebook? Also you using Google reader to check the update is another burden. You can use Anothr.com to keep alerted for any updates of facebook.

  5. Farhan Lalji

    It’s what people do with the data that will be interesting. So now that the feeds are out let’s see the widget’s that take this one step further – i.e. integrate with blogs, push to mobile etc. My guess is that F’book has dipped it’s toe in and will open up other elements once this trial goes smoothly.Am I the only one who’s concerned with the fact that people can see my friends posted items and all my friends status updates simply by knowing me?

  6. Robert Seidman

    I want what you want, Fred — but how does anyone get paid?Can We Get Everything We Want…for Free?

  7. Vidar Andersen

    I second that.Open means giving and taking, sending and receiving, reading and writing. I’d still say that the people claiming Facebook is currently open are mad.

  8. 健康

    乙肝

  9. Daniele Muscetta

    At the moment Facebook’s API won’t let you update your status programmatically.I did write a small piece of code that does it – http://www.muscetta.com/200… Actually, my code is only a C# port of another piece of code written in PHP I found on the net – http://www.nexdot.net/blog/…It works, but until they (facebook) decide to provide an official API for it, it remains only a dirty hack…

  10. Julian Bond

    “I want to use Twitter to update my Facebook status.”Me too. Where are the external APIs that allow external programs to manipulate Facebook data?

  11. anon

    bit off subject but: speaking of twitter.re: gossip i read your post, i chked out your ‘what i am doing’, i cut pasted and whamo , i’m at flickr. the result of a little foot work ( perhaps a walk to the office) and a blackberry.a little gossip is always good. so i’ll get top the point. i hear madonna is buying 5 floors. in the hood of 50 mil.total custom hand built interiors. could be cool. plus cheap at that price.i love this world wide inter web thing. i marvel at the way news (gossip) travels today.back to work.

  12. David Bayer

    Fred,I appreciate your thoughts and insights and have become a recent reader of your posts. I agree that a closed system is counterintuitive to the open, collaborative aspect of the web and is not conducive to an online “winner take all strategy”. That being said, I’m not sure I agree that there is no “winner take all” strategy on the internet. While I’m a big proponent of multiple Internet operating systems as the most likely outcome of the next dozen years, I’m not sure one should rule out the possibility of a platform lockin similar to Microsoft’s desktop umbrella. After recently rereading several articles from the mid 90’s about the future of the Internet, its pretty clear that, generally speaking, we don’t know what we don’t know.Thanks for sharing your thoughts with the rest of us & keep up the good work!David BayerPresidentDataBanq Media

  13. medyum

    You are right.