Facebook and smartphone “apps” may change the nature of the web as we know it | OnIslam.net
The rise of Google signaled the maturing of the Web as the medium that accommodated almost all other media, from text to audio and video content. Most users embraced that medium standardization. Suddenly Google, along with other search engines, became our indispensable guides into that world.
The success of Facebook, in contrast, marked the maturing of our Web habits, and thus the growing amount at every one's disposal of what author Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus” (the title of his latest book, though he has been using the term for several years).
That began with the routinization of our Web use. We knew when to peek into email and more or less what to expect. We dispatched Word Documents back and forth, with changes tracked and comments stacked in the margins. We skimmed and organized the daily harvest from our “feed aggregators.” We occasionally or obsessively went back to the familiar blogs. And, of course, all along we googled, initially cheered and surprised by its speed and accuracy at coughing back results, but only initially. And appropriately so — there is only so much admiration one (ordinary human being) can harbor for an algorithm.
The routine meant it took us less time to do what we wanted to do over the Web. But the time and cognitive surplus that was freed by the standardization of our Web behavior hardly translated into more of what many of us may consider “productive” activities — such as, say, reading more classics from the Gutenberg Project. In other words, our Web “productivity” met its diminishing returns ceiling.
So, as our routines thickened, our fascination with the familiar Web slimmed. A collective craving grew for something that could suck in the entire surplus in our time and brain processing cycles. Thus emerged a breed of Web services -- such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook -- which centered on helping organize individuals, rather than files, into an infinite number of virtual groupings. For the fascination-starved Web populace of the opening years of the third millennium, the shift was abundantly timely and riveting.
The Search Engine vs. The Social Network
The problem is that we, the Web citizenry, cannot have both at the same time. Or at least we cannot have each thriving independently of how the other fares. That is because the search engine and the social network require two different information environments — environments that could at best coexist but not interconnect.
Google, the leading search engine, thrives in an environment whereby more stuff is constantly added to the Web and made available to all. And at times it acquires, and then offers free, services that facilitate just that (such as Blogger, JotSpot, now Google Sites, and YouTube). The search engine, however, does not own what people create through its services (nor, of course, the services of others). And in many cases, Google is happy to help you take your wares from one of their services to another by a different provider (as in Blogger).
Facebook too encourages users to create and share. But unlike the search engine, it owns everything users create in the course of their Facebook experience (not to mention Facebook’s inclination to unilaterally tinker with the privacy terms of the site).
Now with an estimated user base of over 500 millions, a lot of human communications, and thus creativity, happens on Facebook every day. Yet Google and the other search engines are kept away from all the action. Search engines look at Facebook and see a black-box, an opaque lump of Web presence that is impervious to indexing.
Nor is Facebook alone in going opaque on search engines. A great many academic journals and subscriber-only newspapers and newsletters are shielded from search engine crawlers.
At a glance, it may seem as though Facebook is not complying with the openness and sharing ethic it itself encourages among its users. That may be true to some degree. What is not immediately obvious, however, is whether we can condemn Facebook for flouting, or thank Google for embracing, the “worldwide web” ideal as envisioned and realized by the Web creator Tim Berners-Lee.
The different approaches by Google and Facebook can be viewed through two prisms. One is that it is the way each decided to do business (and make money). As a search engine, Google benefits when everybody complies with Web standards and information is easily sharable across websites and computing platforms (for example, phones and computers or Windows and Linux operating systems) because that makes it more efficient, and thus more profitable.
Facebook’s is a different story. Exclusivity is perhaps the social network’s core value — at one level excluding the others who are not “friends;” at another not allowing other websites, particularly search engines, to monitor or index what happens in the Facebook universe.
There may be a good reason for that strategy. The past decade has witnessed many examples of the information guides (be it Google to Web pages, iTunes to music, or Amazon.com to books) becoming generally more powerful than the creators or purveyors of the information. In other words, whatever Google indexes it virtually subjugates. Whenever a channel is recognized as the superior method to arrive at a certain type of content, the channel becomes more important than the content.
A vivid illustration of this is when the New York Times discontinued in 2007 its paid-service TimesSelect, launched less than two years earlier. The Times cited “significant alterations in the online landscape” for the decision. That was to say that with more and more people landing on NYTimes.com pages through search engines, putting articles behind subscription fee walls would risk the newspaper falling into oblivion. The fact that Google was increasingly the main routing-matchmaking mechanism (users to information) forced the NYTimes.com to adjust to what the search engine demanded.
That state of affairs was eloquently captured by Michael Wolff in an article in the September 2010 issue of Wired magazine. “Google,” he wrote, “by managing both traffic and sales (advertising), created a condition in which it was impossible for anyone else doing business in the traditional Web to be bigger than or even competitive with Google.”
Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder and chief executive) understood that. Unlike other social networks (such as Twitter) that let Google search through them, Facebook was happy to stay behind its walls. Google tried to pressure Facebook by starting the OpenSocial alliance which sought to standardize how Websites can be fitted with social-networking tools (remember, Web standardization is always good for Google.). The alliance involves MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, among other social networks. Judging by the appearances, however, the OpenSocial has not mustered enough presence to neither threaten nor cajole Facebook into joining.
No Room for Good or Bad
The Google-Facebook competition, therefore, provides no grounds for throwing “good” or “bad” labels. Yet there is another prism through which to view their diverging approaches. Their different models happen to be of long-term consequence for the Web as we know it.
A Google-style future would likely be one in which the Web could continue on its path as the medium that can be harnessed instantly and cheaply for information. Indeed, it could be argued that a major component of the Web success has been its level, open environment.
A Facebook-style future is likely to be one of a splintered Web, multiple walled-gardens Web “platforms” that coexist by don’t communicate. Facebook’s strength is in its exclusivity.
That specter of a splintered Web is hardly a hazy one. In 2008 Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor, showed his deep concern about that trend in a book entitled, The Future of the Web — and How to Stop It. Another manifestation of the splintering is the searing growth of content delivered through smart-phone “apps” (instead of the regular Web browser).
To be sure, whether it is Facebook or the “apps,” users are often driven by the search for convenience (and fascination). But as with other things in life, convenience and fascination, at least sometimes, could lead one down a slippery slope.
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