[Hipchan]

I think a social layer is inevitable, the way that people used to interact with websites purely through urls today is too impersonal. What Facebook is doing is creating a great abstraction layer to improve the UX of the web as a whole.

Which is fantastic, except that it's Facebook.

Support an open competitor.

[quizbiz]

I think you're onto something and I think what we're seeing is the resurgence of portals on the web. Reddit and Hacker News are niche content portals. Facebook is in a position to be a mass market portal to the entire web.

Competition is a matter of time and people's purpose driven browsing will continue to push people to various sources.

I'm not sure what you mean by an open competitor.

[mtw]

he means projects like diaspora

[rhizome]

I've thought for a long time that eventually there will be profile providers and network providers, to which you plug your profile information into with varying degrees of exposure.

This may evolve such that Facebook becomes more open as demand for openness increases, or there could be a Diaspora-like force that blows the closed-garden open, but like the online services of the 80s and 90s I think that openness will out. Facebook's challenge is to stay ahead of this curve such that their garden appears to be more open than it is in order to stem attrition, but there are still lots of people who aren't interested in likes or tweeting or any other form of information-disgorgement toward a private company. Couple this with possible (and possibly inevitable) privacy breaches and Facebook remains vulnerable. Think of where Google was five years ago and where they stand today, as a less-than-total (and possibly decreasing) presence.

There is an ebb-and-flow to these developments, and Facebook users constitute thin-clients in the continuing historical battle between centralization and nodal power.

EDIT: clarified 'thin-client' relationship