[___alt]

Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages.

* It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues).

* It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates.

* It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to.

* It has group conversation.

* It has event planning.

Personal pages have none of that, except with syndication where RSS is a partial solution. And on top of that, Facebook is providing it free-of-charge (with the "hidden" cost of scattering your personal data all across the universe) with very minimal setup, including for laypersons.

[peterwwillis]

Exactly. People want to be connected, to have a kind of collection of people at their fingertips. Check what someone's been doing, send them a message. They want to share their memories and experiences. And they want the addictive qualities of Facebook... the likes, the comments, the feeds.

All of that is a social network, which is not a personal webpage.

You could create federated pages with these features using the following:

- web pages with comments and pingbacks

- wysiwyg editors

- photo albums and photo editing tools

- blogging

- direct messaging (xmpp/jabber)

Then, you could create individual social network portals that you could authorize to syndicate your federated web site. They could also host your website themselves. And each could offer unique tools, such as tools for event planning, or to help musicians promote their music (MySpace, anyone?). But the idea would hinge on multiple of these popping up at the same time, owned by different start-ups, which could be tricky.

[newscracker]

> Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages.

I'm going to argue on the following points based on observations.

> - It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues).

Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they do, hardly anyone changes it often. Almost everyone leaves it at something that may not be appropriate for all the content they're sharing. Facebook, after its many privacy blunders, reminds people about the audience setting sometimes, but I don't see people changing it. Also, "lists" as a concept to control who sees what was stillborn. Less than a fraction of a percentage in my circles would even be aware of it (this despite me trying to educate people about privacy).

> - It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates.

Here again, it's easy to follow updates that Facebook deems the best to keep the person coming back to show more ads and make more money. Almost nobody knows how to choose to see someone's posts always and how to avoid someone's posts short of unfriending them. The default is users not knowing that they can control it, which means practically they don't control what they see and what they don't see.

> - It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to.

The same argument in the previous point applies here too. Facebook focuses on making people come back often. So the discovery feature may be useful in some cases, but usually it tends to create an overload of people, groups and pages to connect with. Search on Facebook is dismal, and the main "discovery" mechanism is Facebook's suggestions (which is incentivized for ads).

To summarize, Facebook's features work to maximize holding people's attention on its platform and showing ads. How well this matches with one's individual choices varies a lot. Facebook isn't really doing anything phenomenal in surfacing relevant content to people.

[LocalPCGuy]

As a counterpoint to your counterpoint, at least Facebook's default setting is friends and friends of friends (I believe, it's been a while since I've had mine on the default setting). By default a personal website is public, and it'd be pretty difficult to setup authentication and user accounts for the people you want to be able to see your content, keeping it secure and preventing it from leaking. That is a pretty huge difference. Not arguing Facebook has been perfect, obviously they've had huge blunders, but it is vastly simpler and more secure (most of the time) for the average person compared to them trying to do it themselves.

[BeetleB]

>Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they do, hardly anyone changes it often.

To be fair, that's true for most permissions on UNIX/Windows for the average person. Having a flexible ACL system that is user friendly is likely impossible. Either you make it friendly, but reduce its capabilities, or you make it complex and provide flexibility.

[___alt]

I agree that Facebook's implementation of those features is piss-poor and your analysis is on point. However you can't expect something to be a proper Facebook alternative with them missing.