Why does Facebook need to keep re-inventing the wheel? Badly?
UPDATED Tue May 13 22:21:07 EDT 2008
Just so you know, I don’t mind Facebook. I use it about exactly the same as when I first started using it - which is lightly but consistently. I ignore all pokes and prods and bites and use it just to keep in touch with folks. Most of my friends if they use any social networking at all use Facebook, although plenty of them eschew even that (as evidenced by my teeny friends list, sniff sniff) - I’m grateful if they’re just on IM much less twitter or FriendFeed.
So, there it is. Here’s the thing that drives me crazy about Facebook - they’re taking this walled garden crap way to seriously. Just because they love that wall, they feel need to engineer all the flowers in the garden (hm… I took the analogy too far on that one, didn’t I?). For example. Chat. Ok, not a terrible idea, reasonable to believe that people on the site might like chatting with each other. But guess what? This problem has already been solved! Many times now. Everyone is already on a chat network, AIM, gtalk, MSN, Jabber - we’re there already.
Instead of piggybacking on one of those, which would let us use all the robust chat tools we’re already comfortable and happy using, they decided to start from scratch and try to prevent any of that from happening. The protocol is undocumented and they provide no developer API’s to tap into it, they wanted FB chat to be it’s own thing. Of course, it’s already been broken and Digsby currently supports it in their chat client and it’s around the corner for Adium, too. So what was the point? Why make it harder for everyone if they know it’s just going to happen anyway?
Another example is their Inbox. Here’s a functionally deficient tool - as soon as you start getting any reasonable amount of traffic in your inbox it quickly becomes pretty useless - little more than a private wall. It turns out that this problem has been solved too, they call it email. Facebook has taken steps to make it more email like but the model is right there and well known, why not just go the whole way? They’re glacially moving towards the model, allowing people to group their address book friends list and allowing you to send notes to email addresses. But just go the whole way, it isn’t a mystery - folders, search and ordering and why not throw in some sweet POP or IMAP action?
I’m just saying, this functionality it’s all there and well understood. It isn’t like they are inventing the wheel, there’s tons of perfectly good wheels out there - even if they don’t want to use an existing wheel, they should create a new one that’s just as good. You on the Facebook? What do you think?
UPDATE: Huh, look at that, guess they decided they didn’t need to invent no wheel. Looks like they’re going to announce Jabber and XMPP support for chat. Good on them!
