When I heard that Facebook was allowing its users to download their entire history in a single file, I was stunned. Honestly, the fact that users had already built their network of friends, acquaintances and family digitally at a single place was the reason why I thought we came back to Facebook more often. And these were just the nodes. And we all know that the value of the network is directly proportional to the square of the number of nodes i.e. the value is in the number of connections established i.e. YouTube videos, Wall posts and applications. Yet, here was Facebook allowing you to download all this to a single zip file on your hard disk. Now anyone could build a competitor with the data ready at hand.
The reason I was also stunned was that with Facebook entering the location-based social networking space with Facebook places, it’s key advantage was that it controlled the user’s data i.e. for example if one of my FB friends was at the same location where I was (assuming both of us were Foursquare users), Foursquare would not be able to identify us as friends until we re-established that connection on Foursquare. This was equivalent to registering into another social network and re-establishing all our connections and actions. So you typically would have to use as much as the Facebook APIs you could on your product giving Facebook clear control over access to your data. I won’t get into whether that was a right or a wrong move and the debate around who should and who actually controls a user’s data. But controlling the data was clearly an enormous entry barrier for other copycats. So why have they allowed users to download ALL their data basically demolishing this entry barrier?
1) The launch of Diaspora which claims to be the “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.” It’s partly a response to user’s concerns about privacy issues that keep cropping up around the social network. Facebook may be worried that a tipping point may arise wherein people move out of the social network just because of the privacy issues.
2) Facebook needs to put up a strong show that it does indeed care of about people’s privacy and respect their ownership of their data. Facebook has also got some flack for blocking Google’s Friend Connect, instead prefering it’s own Facebook Connect API for developers.
There have been quite a mixed response to Facebook’s steps most of it positive. The only criticism is maybe it hasn’t done enough. But atleast it seems to be moving in the positive direction
But more importantly, what does Facebook really lose in terms of advantage?
1) Just the appearance of new social networks is not enough for people to join in. Facebook is brilliant in its handling of social networking concepts and has built many of those by itself. To compete with Facebook, it’s not enough to be Facebook. You have to beat it.
2) There is no price undercutting in this business. The service is free. You can’t create a social network and undercut Facebook on price.
3) One hidden point. You can’t export your contacts’ details with you. More specifically, you can only move your data but for your Facebook network to be replicated on another social network, each one of your friends has to move onto the new network. And how many people really have multiple accounts on multiple networks ? Personally, for me, it’s Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. My Orkut account is on life-support.
4) Facebook is head and shoulders above other networks. It’s brilliant simplicity and features draw millions of users per day. Drawing a crowd to another network entails giving them what Facebook doesn’t. And that is one hell of a task !
Hence, I think this is a brilliant move by Facebook. It has now given its users a sense of security that they can switch services if they would like to. Without realizing, that most probably they won’t. They’ve put smiles on the faces of most privacy organizations as well, and basically redeeming themselves in the eyes of their users.
