The Facebook Rebellion

Manifesto: We must have an open social stream standard. Something that does for social media what HTML does for the World Wide Web. Imagine if Facebook or something like it was not owned by just one company. Imagine if you didn't have to look at ads just to see what your friends were up to. Imagine if you could choose whatever interface you wanted to view your social stream, and sort the data however you wanted. What if there was a singular way to access your entire social network without being captive by a particular company or site. What if there were multiple, customizable interfaces available to view your social stream?

Is Facebook getting too big for its britches? It is already trying too hard to control the data, the users, the interface, and to compete with twitter, instead of Embracing it. Twitter itself is a good start: LinkedIn and MySpace are already syncing status updates with it, which is cool. But what about syncing contacts, pictures, videos, links, blog posts, documents, projects and everything else? An open social standard would allow ANYTHING to be shared, across different social networks.

My solution: Still use Facebook for now. Still use other social sites until something better comes along. Any true 'content,' I will post somewhere else as well as Facebook. Why should Facebook alone get the sole benefit of our collective contacts and content? I will link to my content on twitter, and Facebook status.

I will still use Facebook for what it's best at: finding and keeping in touch with friends, old and new!