[governance] open standard for "facebook crowd" interactions

[Norbert Bollow]

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > Suppose someone invested a lot of effort into building something
> > which meets similar communication needs as FB, but with better
> > privacy properties. Network effects would likely cause this new
> > thing to be very unattractive to potential early adopters because
> > "everyone is on Facebook" unless sufficiently rich APIs are
> > available to effectively integrate the users of facebook.com
> > with the users of the new site into a single social network.
> >
> > Even if we assume that suitable APIs for doing this exist *now*,
> > in the absence of any effective governance mechanism
> 
> Can you specify what governance mechanism you would like to see?

It'd have to be one which
- does not get in the way of innovation
- allows, when innovation has happened and it has resulted in a large
  global user community with strong network effects, the creation of
  open standards that empower competing sites/services/software-vendors
  to effectively allow their users to become part of the same community
- provides mechanisms that allow forcing companies with globally
  significant market share to fully implement these standards
- provides mechanisms for updating these standards as appropriate
- doesn't get undermined by patent issues

> > that takes
> > adequately into account also stakeholder interests which may
> > conflict with those of Facebook Inc. and the perceived interest
> > of the U.S. government, the company is not in any way obligated
> > to play along -- and the risk that they possibly wouldn't is
> > probably enough to prevent anyone from making the above-mentioned
> > investment.
> 
> But new social network pop up nearly everyday.
> 
> Both FB and Google are building entire ecosystems.  Both are built on
> showing you adverts.  But both thrive by building tools so that others
> can play with those tools and build new stuff.
> 
> How would you like to regulate these ecosystems?

I don't know. I'm right now at the stage of "it might be good to
start by recognizing that a problem exists, and to discuss it in
order to understand better what the problem consists of exactly,
how big it is, etc."

Greetings,
Norbert
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