Loic LeMeur has been posting his ideas about the Decentralised Me; it's much of what I have been blogging about for a long time now - what I have called the Digital Persona. It's a Cloud Computing matter that finally touches upon the very core of software as a service; the notion that personal rich-media publishing (blogs, photos, file-sharing, presence/status updates etc) is valuable to businesses if they can find a way to encourage users to bring-together all those threads under one roof.
Facebook does this more successfully than anyone else (right now). Plug-in "applications" notwithstanding, the out-of-the-box experience on Facebook ticks all the boxes of basic lifestreaming; personal publishing, status/presence updates, visual media sharing, community functionality and the aggregation services necessary to make a single personal relevant data-stream for each user.
Spend enough time beefing-up your profile on Facebook (and enjoying the feedback of friends and communities) and suddenly you realise that even if viable competitors existed, you'd stay loyal to Facebook. After all, your data is there. Your digital persona is centred there. Your lifestream is there. You'd only leave if the competition offered something remarkable.
The only trade-off in this arrangement is that you must live with Facebook's branding. You must accept that it's not a brand you can play with. You can't change the Facebook banner logo with one of your own choosing. You can't customise your profile to appear a seamless extension of your existing website or blog. You can't remove the adverts.
Of course, this will most likely change at some point in the future; imagine an inexpensive monthly subscription service offering Facebook Premium services - we can only speculate at how much customisation would be permitted, and I'm pretty certain the Facebook brand would remain intact and immovable - but the adverts would go in an instant.
An offline version (think Google Docs or any other smart client app you've used in the past) would be a logical next-step and hugely useful for those who use Facebook as part of their communications routine; don't forget that many businesses actively support the use of Facebook, establishing their own personal Networks and Groups. Some companies provide community support services via closed Facebook Groups. When someone describes Facebook as the MySpace for adults, they're doing it a disservice; Facebook has outgrown the University-only social networking vision it started with; it's now a viable extension of everyday business services.
And all we have to do is accept that - however we use it - our digital persona's over on Facebook are appropriately - and indelibly - branded. It might be our data; but it's their brand. And they won't make it easy to for us to leave.
And yet, leave we shall, because there's always a bigger fish. There will be a successor to Facebook (sooner or later) that offers all the same, plus something remarkably different.
No comments:
Post a Comment