I wanted to follow up on this to reinforce a point. Forgive my ignorance but I am not already familiar with "FB Script" per se; apparently an API and I'm guessing to either pull from, or both pull from and push data to one's FB account.
I won't bill myself out as "a whiz-bang programmer" but I have an MSCS and have been programming professionally since 1980. I have "seen it all go by" - the advent of C++ and object-oriented programming, the early days of web commercial transaction support, all the 'specialized' languages one after another, PHP, Python, Ruby and whatever next. The love affair with Java on the server side (the best cannons to shoot the least flies).
The actual underlying world is based on protocols. If you want to see what is TRULY emerging "on the Net", that is where I would look, and I don't recall any recent RFCs doing anything really special. Did they fix IRC, for example, to prevent the whole channel piracy problem? I haven't checked but I think the answer is No. That world changes only slowly (until the next "really cool protocol" emerges.)
I write this post partly as an "open question." I would like to know: what makes Facebook "so special"?
jabailo in quotes:
(1) "[...] the platform game is over, and whining about the split milk of My Space isn't going to make you rich. However, jumping in and learning some FB Script might."
Anyone could provide an API to interact with their own site's features - in fact anyone would. What is special here?
(2) "The protocol of Facebook is instantaneous personal communication. So it replaces email, chat and so on with the Wall."
It will be only the 115th such "hey! I've discovered what 'portals' are!" nondiscovery. Really: for every 100 programmers, 85 of them could write some sort of integration code to do similar things.
(3) "But, it does even more. Facebook is challenge to very way we use computers. Facebook inherently is a tool for real world relationships, not a cyberworld of virtual ones."
This is nonsense, and it sounds to me like it was taken from some boilerplate that Facebook publishes. Facebook makes your contacts no more TANGIBLE and PHYSICAL than they were when you dealt with the same contacts electronically NOT using Facebook. The most you could say is that Facebook eases repetitive tasks associated with contacting people - but those contacts are electronic and thus virtual and you've made nothing any more "concrete" than it was by communicating otherwise. Here I would point out that this 'selling point' is PROPAGANDA - because it asserts something it doesn't deliver. You feel better to use Facebook because you "believe" the nonsense about being "better connected than you would have been via email and web alone." How, exactly, are you really "better connected"? I almost feel like this statement could be replaced by "using Facebook makes all your social communications MORE SUCCESSFUL", because that is just as empty a claim as the claim they (you) made.
"It insists on webs of trust based on the physical world. What could be better?"
Better would be Genuine Physical Interaction? Now how about "webs of trust." What does that mean? If I "like" someone, does that mean I trust them? Do you actually think Facebook models, in any way remotely approaching our reality, the ways in which one person "trusts" another? I might trust you to date my sister but not to drive my car. Can Facebook model that? Do I have any means to describe WHAT I trust about another person and WHY? No. So to any extent that "Facebook" claims to "model your reality", what they don't tell you is that their model is incredibly simplistic and largely useless.
This error is reflected in Economics as well. There is a school of thought that says the single piece of information you need in order to run your ENTIRE ECONOMY is just the PRICE of any good and THAT IS ALL. Now, this is an amazingly clever idea and a wonderful theory - well developed - but it is also OBVIOUSLY PATENTLY FALSE. The people who wrote this theory live in Ivory Towers; in their minds if people would just behave according to the assumptions of their model, then all would be good because their model would be correct. That is so self-serving and blind. They're supposed to be delivering USEFUL models and so you have to model WHAT IS, not what is EASY TO MODEL. And they do not have the first notion of what to model IN FACT. The simplest refutation of their notions is that when I am faced with a choice - say $1.00 for a Chinese-made doodad and $1.25 for an American-made same thing - I may well choose the American product despite the price difference. For a REASON, too. It shows that I do NOT just use PRICE as the only factor in making a purchase - so the Ivory Tower model is crap. From the outset.
"Facebook" wants to make a claim to have "organized your reality" for you in some cognitively comprehensive way. That is effectively a claim that they have produced an Artificial Intelligence, and they have done no such thing. I say that all their toys are nonoriginal and obvious; and apart from convenience, the site doesn't really offer anything orignal in a programming sense. Hell, they don't even offer a choice of organizational layout: what if I want others to see my life organized by TOPICS and not CHRONOLOGICALLY, as I said: or even make that a selectable choice?
(4) "The next step is that our businesses may be organized this way. For example, everyone has been searching for the Holy Grail of CRM -- Customer Relationship Management."
I'm ever the contrarian ... CRM here as I perceive it used, means a proactive bothering of your clients to pound more advertising and sales at them. How about an international system of CRM of the nature "I hate advertising and would like to opt out of all of it?" Embedded in this concept of CRM is the notion that people are stupid, passive consumers and that you have the "right" to invade their attention spans to try to push crap on them. I have yet to hear how the industry recognizes that now with the Net, people can specifically elect what, if any, products they would LIKE to hear about.
Implicit under the conversation is the notion that these new invasive techniques are ACCEPTABLE and DESIRED by the Public - and I say that is bullshit; we were never asked if we wanted our world of information to be COMMERCIALLY ORGANIZED AND DEDICATED. In that sense, "CRM" is what businesses want to do that the public probably doesn't want and never asked for: more interaction in hopes of squeezing the last possible cent from sales.
"Putting people's neice's birthdays into a database never really worked. Could Facebook and its honeycomb of personal contacts do a better job?"
Are there not a half-dozen "integrated sales tools programs" of the nature of "Act!"? And I believe what Act! does is aleady far more sophisticated than what Facebook offers. The answer to your question is NO, Facebook is not doing a better job. It's a pedestrian tool (so far as I have seen) and NO program can do a better job of sales "for you" than you have a talent for selling in the first place.
"What about customer service? What about product introduction? What if all these terms are completely archaic."
You're confusing "the website Facebook" with generic issues of sales and marketing. Facebook is not, after all, really, a "sales and marketing tool", is it? Is that all it is? How boring.
In summary I ask: what really profound thing is it that Facebook does, that makes it "the place to use"? I'm not asking about NUMBERS - let's not be confused. The NUMBER of people "I can reach" on Facebook is one thing and I don't want a reference to that in the answer. I want to know: what specifically is it that Facebook does that makes it in any sense "necessary" to use?
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