Facebook: Learning to share. I want to expand on the Facebook/AOL reference I made earlier today.

While Facebook is built using web technologies, it is significantly different from most web applications and sites in that it is largely closed off from the rest of the web. Jon Udell refers to this as a walled-garden, which I think is fairly accurate. Facebook is built on the web, and is accessed over the internet like any other site. It leverages content on the web, and in fact makes it incredibly easy (but in a heavily restricted way) for people to share links to items they find online.

However, the rest of the web cannot see what is going on inside Facebook. Entities, like people and groups, have URLs with IDs that can be referenced from outside Facebook. Not fully referenced, though, unless the user is logged into Facebook. Only with a Facebook ID are you able to access any of the goodness that Facebook offers. Having said that, a lot of this "goodness" only makes sense if you have a Facebook ID to identify you. It is the underpinning of their social network.

Facebook is really good as a social network application: connecting people, helping them to stay in touch, etc. Extremely well done. Comment spam? Non-exisitant. But FB is far from perfect.

Their search capabilities when you are trying to find someone are unnecessarily lame, especially once you try to search using anything but name. Trying to search for something like "mcgill 1992 physics" can't easily be done. More often then naught you have to search for "mcgill 1992" and then browse through a few hundred graduates. And most of the search results pages don't even have ads on them, so why waste my time? Setting behavior patterns is one possibility. You could also argue that if I don't know the person's name, then why would I want to find them? Can someone else come up with a better search engine for FB data? I haven't read the API docs, but I wouldn't think so. (Originally, you needed a FB account to view their API documentation. They have since corrected that problem, but it is illustrative of their thinking.)

Another pain is the recent introduction of applications. My main beef with these is that many of these apps generate new items in my news feed as my friends add, use, and remove them. Every other kind of event I can filter from my news feed, but not applications. Why?

Here's where the closed nature of Facebook becomes a pain. Although I could find or even try to develop an application that scratches whatever particular itch I may have, there is still this corporate entity in control of everything that could at any moment choose to exert its control on me any how I use the data I've dumped into FB. While that is certainly their right to do, I don't think it is a desirable end-game as far as the web is concerned. Alternatives are necessary.

Am I about to stop using Facebook? No! Its really too useful and frankly, too much fun. However, the fact that it is so closed off from the rest of the web is troublesome. Why not add a privacy setting that would allow users to set visibility to "Everyone" as in everyone on the web, not just everyone with a FB account. That way I could still share with the web, but the social networking would require a FB account. Want to comment on one of my photos or my posts? Get a FB account. Want to find people? Get a FB account. Want to join a group? Get a FB account. Want to buy/sell on the marketplace? Get a FB account.

In other words, there should be a way for people (and applications) to view a subset of the Facebook universe without having to be authenticated. That subset would be determined by Facebook's users, and not Facebook itself. Right now, I don't think many people care: they are happy in their walled garden. However, I think that at some point Facebook's need to grow is going to force it to open itself up to the rest of the web. Ideally, though, I'd prefer an open alternative.