I couldn’t agree more on the potential of Facebook. Even if MySpace has more users, even if FB is nowhere in Brazil (vs. Orkut), UK (vs.Bebo), Finland (apparently) , I really believe in an advanced social network being a perfect portal for accessing the Internet.

Nonetheless, one shouldn’t believe to much in the internalization of applications / services in one website or portal. After all, even if a social network cannot for now compete technically with Facebooks, there still is and will be a room for sub-applications such as photo sharing, editing, IM, etc…Because they are focused on a single part, these specific applications or services just have a tendency to be constantly improved, and therefore much better than complete integrated packages.

It’s like the PC industry: even if you do sell the best PC ever, you will still find far better components available on the market. The collection and integration of all these is not an easy job, and certainly only a few players can do it well; but hey, you can’t just pretend control the whole chain, and develop yourself OS, CPUs, GPUs, hard drives, RAM, peripherals, and all that. At least you will never offer the optimal products all along the chain.

Apple has tried, and failed: IBM has tried, and failed. No doubt opening up even more the “application” network and enhancing compatibility with third party software or Internet services should be the right way of doing for Facebook to definitely wash away competitors.

Yet this means accepting diversity, pluralism and competition, like IBM did when they sub-contracted chips and OS dor their PCs to Intel and Microsoft respectively.

Many analysts says that Facebook will not eat the internet entirely, because Microsoft and Google already tried, and they were not successful. Contrary to those analysts, I really think Facebook wil eat the entire internet. They will be the internet inside the internet. There will be Facebook and the rest of the (internet) world.

Before everyone used one’s computer to access the internet, and in fine to access services. Now everyone will use a computer to access internet to access facebook to access services. An interesting figure would be to analyze how many startups Facebook killed or will killed (e.g. birthday Alarm, photos services …) and how many new creation they will make possible inside Facebook with their platforM. Go to developer.facebook.com and watch the F8 video.

No wonder why Marc Z. refused the takeover bids: Facebook is much more valuable than anything. It is worth 25% of the internet value – how much is it ?

This is significant…

” Unless of course you mean by OS a core set of applications like e-mail, text editor etc.

” => more or less.

You would have probably noticed that I did not mention “web based OS” in my post. For example, I don’t believe in a Google OS either.

What I meant, more precisely, was that if most applications are now web-based, and therefore OS-independent, then as I said “light is shed out of the OS”. The most important game is then not fought between OS providers but rather betwen online application providers.

For the “terminal/mainframe stuff, Steve”, you’re absolutely right: Sun has been advocating this approach since decades. I can even recall when in 1997, McNealy (Sun’s CEO) compared computers with water taps, suggesting that the characteristics of the computer (including its OS) will be fully secondary to the quality of the Internet access.

However, you and I surely agree that this visions still remains far from reality… at least for now. I found interesting to see that both Google and Facebook are actively working in that direction though.

Also, a reality check, as far as I know, Facebook is nothing in Finland, where as Google and Microsoft are (naturally) used a lot. I bring this up because even though Internet has homogenized a lot of information (Google, Wikipedia…), there are still a lot of regional differences. One only needs to take a look what is the major IM network in different European countries. For example, no-one I know uses either AIM or Yahoo! in Finland, but there are people still mainly using ICQ. The vast majority are Live Messenger users.

Web 2.0 seems more and more to me as presentation layer people trying to fix infrastructure layer stuff (I read this excellent description in some blog I can’t remember anymore). If it’s terminal/mainframe stuff, Steve, you’re after, Sun’s been working that angle for years and years. You know, the company, who has the slogan “the network is the computer”? I doubt Facebook can never rival the solutions Sun and other traditional companies have created for mobile web infrastructure.

Actually I have seen Facebook’s applications getting more and more popular in the recent days, but I did not understand how they made it, neither did I believe it corresponded to an offensive strategy…

@Matthias: You are right. I also truly prefer a “standard” OS, traditional desktop applications, etc.. My ISP keeps unplugging Internet occasionnally, just imagine how painful this could be if most of my work was done online !

But although OSs are alive and kicking, this trend towards online application is doubtless.

Beside that I never meant that Facebook would enter the business of search engines. There Google is much to far ahead.

Concerning the new OS: David Gelernter talks about something similar, I think. See here: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0507/156.html

My opinion to both Google and Facebook: At least for the next few years I will trust Microsoft and be happy about my licences. They let me work independently of the internet and store my files at my own place. Why should I share any secret either with Facebook or with Google?

For me Microsofts business is safe as long as we do have to pay for internet access. But how many years will this go on?

Facebook’s API concept is a great one, and they have their own query language platform set up already for data retrieval.

The extendability of Facebook by 3rd party developers is what makes it very powerul, potentially.

They already added a classified advertisement system, additional applications within your own profile that you can add at will, etc.

To summarize what I said: both Google and Facebook are developing online applications, that could in the mid-run replace desktop applications, and why not completely bring light out of conventional OSs.

Now things get difficult as Facebook reaches out for new goals. My question is: What will Facebook’s community do? Will they stay? The students only wanted a cuddly playground and now things get very different. Isn’t that a risky strategy for facebook?

Actually, Facebook could be a very good customized homepage, something that Google isn’t as of yet.

It seems that it aims to do even better than sharing video/text/pictures, like for example editing directly pictures within the web page, something only advanced AJAX principles seem to allow.

I agree with you on Facebook’s evolving business model, making it a prominent actor on the online landscape. It’s moving from a simple community website to a content sharing platform. The famous Facebook’s “share” icon took time to be widely used, but now seems to have entered the member’s habits. Like digg or technorati, it allows to qualify websites, video or blog posts referencing. On this point, it is indeed a threat to google leadership, challenging the model of automated website referencing.