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Facebook: stop whining if you’ve been on the web < a decade
I just left a comment on this post of Hugh Macleod’s:
I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:
For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff
Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction
There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating
It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).
Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.
We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.
I think many people who have seen the web develop since the mid-1990’s will understand this and ‘get it’. We’re able to see it from a bigger picture, the arch that the web has taken over the last decade.
Many people new to the web are seeing it (from our point of view) almost at a macro level: they can’t imagine a World before blogs, before wikis, before UGC. I’m not saying Hugh is one of these macro-viewers who doesn’t get the big picture – heck, he gets things most people hadn’t even begun to think about, and he certainly understands the web – but I think he’s wrong on this one.
