The Fatal Shortcoming of Social Media
This is part one of a multi-part commentary on the next generation of internet communications. In this article, I will be exploring the problem of the “walled garden” and closed communications systems.
Twitter. Facebook. MySpace. What do all these systems have in common? They all use isolated, closed servers.
There seems to have been a recent explosion of press. Unless you have been living at the bottom of the ocean for the past month, you undoubtably have heard at least one story about Twitter, Facebook, or some other social media tool. The press in particular has jumped on this latest internet trend.
In the fledgling days of the consumer internet, a number of network service providers, such as America Online, tried to restrict access to what their users could see. To people for whom computer networks were a foreign concept, this approach worked quite well. However, as the internet’s potential for global information and communication permeated society, the shortcomings of this “walled garden” approach became apparent. Users sought other ways to access the “information superhighway”, and the walls came crumbling down.
Some of the current-generation services are more open than others. Twitter, for example, allows greater access to content that Facebook; my “tweets” are republished on this site without any hassle (as well as on my Facebook page, which recently has changed to look more like Twitter).
The appeal of services like Twitter are not lost on me. Much like instant messaging (IM) before it, social media tools allow for short communications between one or more users with relative ease. Unlike IM, though, users can work with multimedia content and, more importantly, work on their own time. Worth noting in the IM category was ICQ, popular in the mid- to late-90′s, allowed messages to be send to “offline” users. Regardless, the popularity of IM is waning, and despite attempts to open their systems, it seems that this medium is on its way out.
Contrast these services with the original internet “killer app”: email. Email does not require you to register with any particular provider; in fact, you can setup your own email server and communicate with (almost) any other server in a matter of minutes. Through a long-term development process, email has evolved into a rich, indispensible tool for global communications. While there may be shortcomings to it, no fad will displace email in the foreseeable future.
Will Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the myriad of other social media persist? It’s certainly possible, but I have my doubts about their long-term viability. Twitter seems to be better than most at opening up their systems to the outside world; they have a published, well-documented API that allows anyone to write applications to access their servers; the problem here is that you still must access their servers. Accessing Facebook from outside their control is almost impossible.
In short, protocols and open formats survive; closed services do not.
