As a newcomer to Facebook, I thought it would be interesting to jot down some of my initial thoughts after I’ve been using the service for just a few days, and then perhaps revisit it sometime in the future after I’ve used it a bit more. The first thing I should note is that I’m not a big fan of these “gated communities” on the web. The web was created as an open and free platform, yet as sites like Facebook and Myspace busily build out ever more compelling social networking sites, I worry about an erosion of that openness and freedom. It’s almost as if they took lessons from AOL in how to capture new users and keep them locked into a proprietary and limiting window on the web.

Facebook is a much more grown up version of Myspace if we accept that they are related at all. I tried to use Myspace for a time, but it’s overall bad design ultimately drove me to delete my account entirely – a step I’ve read hasn’t even been possible on Facebook until recently and then only by special request to Facebook admins. The only choice they offer you on your “profile” page is to deactivate it (not quite the same as deleting since they still have access to all of your information). This is one reason why I haven’t put any real information into Facebook. I am continually amazed at the amount of trust folks have in these kinds of sites that they’ll enter their birthday and schools attended and birthplace and other personal details apparently without any worry whatsoever! Sites like Facebook and Myspace are a gold mine to an identity thief. You can even figure out somebody’s maiden name pretty easily.

The technology Facebook uses has matured over the last few years (dynamically generated database driven content enhanced by the FB equivalents to HTML, XML, and Javascript) but these technologies certainly weren’t developed by them. Most of the stuff that makes Facebook better than Myspace (in my opinion) is the relative open-ness of those technologies themselves. I’ve been using (and trying to learn some of them) for years now since they power most of the php, db-based content management systems I’ve played with running my own sites. Even though Myspace lets users do a lot more customization to their personal homepages, Facebook has succeeded with only plain text because the core components that make the site function are so much more robust. One of these is the operating system itself. Facebook runs the Apache webserver on F5 Big-IP which is a load balancing network appliance with an embedded? Linux controlling the core OS management functions. Myspace runs IIS on Windows Server – enough said. Then there’s the development model: because Facebook is built on a lot of open source building blocks like PHP you can pretty well assume their development is more like open source development which (in my opinion) is just plain *better* than a proprietary model. Linus Torvalds oft quoted adage states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” and in open source development, where everyone can see the code – if enough people care to look you can solve more problems. In proprietary development, who knows what is obscured and for all we know only one guy with a red stapler is looking at the code and he may not be smart enough to see a bug. I’m not saying Facebook is open source, but at least their applications development is.

A lot of Facebook’s success can be attributed to its slick mashup of these technologies in a way that doesn’t reveal to the user that they are doing things that aren’t new at all. Anyone who has used an RSS reader will instantly recognize Facebook for what it is, in fact Google Reader acts a lot like Facebook without the commenting. I once set up a Drupal site and left it so the users could have their own “blogs”. Several users rebelled: “Does everyone need their own blog!? This is nuts!” they cried – but come to find they are all quite happily blogging away on Facebook in almost exactly the same way as that Drupal site worked today and probably don’t even realize it. Granted their Facebook blog posts have been neatly reduced to one sentence twitter-like text messages about what they happen to be doing at the moment and without very much insight or reflection attached. In typcial Facebook genius, they didn’t call it a blog post, but instead just put an open form and the simple instruction to “write something” in it at the top of the page. I’ve yet to run across someone writing much more than about 2 sentences at a time though.

Lest my gentle readers begin to think Nate is a raving Facebook fanboy, I can assure you I am not as yet. The applications I’ve seen are a lot like the Myspace dross I couldn’t stand. It took me a couple days to realize that the quizzes which seem to be pretty popular are mostly just poorly crafted excuses to steal your profile and relationship information, at least FB warns you about it though apparently not too many folks heed it. This kind of information is gold to marketing folks who pay good money for it. Trust me, I know people who sell this stuff. If lame-ass quizzes showing up on your homepage bother you – you can always hide them and never see them again though! The best thing about FB is the photo sharing, yet it’s also the biggest pain in the rear since at least for me more than half the time I try to upload something it times out. It’s so easy to find folks you once knew – and to get back in touch with them. This is most certainly a two edged sword. There may be a good reason I am no longer in touch with some of these people! Thank goodness there is a block user feature – and I intend to use it. Where do people draw the line between their work persona and their private one? It appears that some folks are less worried about it than others. Having an online presence in one form or another since 1996 I can say that I am very careful about what I put up there. Facebook has great promise as a social feed reader and for sharing photos between friends (with commenting), but a publishing platform it’s not. I can’t seem to find a way to add a block of recent posts from my blog on my facebook page – but perhaps I just haven’t looked hard enough? This is a pretty basic thing I should think.