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cory doctorow
ing, reading, filtering, archiving, and searching. Emails from
Facebook aren’t helpful messages, they’re eyeball bait, intended
to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred
wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough
Evite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking,
hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your atten-
tion and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know
something, won’t tell you what it is!”
If there was any doubt about Facebook’s lack of qualification
to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled
garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new adver-
tising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers to use
the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products,
without permission or compensation. Even if you’re the kind of
person who likes the sound of a “benevolent dictatorship,” this
clearly isn’t one.
Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed
by opening up the platform, letting anyone write any app for the
service, easily exporting and importing their data, and so on (this
is the kind of thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance).
Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made
the Web work — openness, decentralization, standardization — it
will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of
“social,” the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into
pure crack for a significant proportion of Internet users.
The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assump-
tion that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point
at which it begins to define “the Internet” for a large slice of the
world’s netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this
is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe’s
Law: “The value of a telecommunications network is proportional
to the square of the number of users of the system.” This law is
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