the endless fight evil vs more evil.

because i wanted to find some note (link? photo?) i posted on facebook months ago i got stunned by the limited search capabilites the website provides.

not even the developer tools or some quick coding with the facebook api could help me.

thus, i googled for some insights or even an application and found a very enlightening wired article from last month: “Great Wall of Facebook; The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out”.

while the sensationalist title pretty much exaggerates the issue, the text provides quite some ugly insights – not primarily about that testosterone-driven facebook ceo, but about a general view on the future of the internet.

according to the article (and obviously to my unsuccessful efforts to search my own facebook data) facebook wants to lock in people in the facebook universe and lock out google from indexing those people’s facebook data.

besides the almost comical twist that this depicts a future where the company that one day becomes the nigthmare everyone wishes to be broken up could be in fact facebook and not google (as currently is considered by media thinkers), it proposes some further reaching questions:

1. could a facebook succeeding with this strategy become the tipping point on the verge between the internet of generative systems to one of tethered appliances? ie. from the internet based on the four freedoms – where everyone can run, modify, copy and improve the system for any purpose – to one based on central control, where the system is a black box which determines whether one may (or may not) do any of these things.

2. could traditional media companies – which are desperately trying to find a way out of their identity crisis – adapt the facebook strategy and in fact start to lock google out and the people in? (maybe even with facebook’s assistance?)

of course, first of all facebook has to make some revenue to prove itself as a reliable business model. i would not bet against facebook being completely irrelevant in a few years from now.

however, big business does not follow logical reasons all the time (as you and me can wittness everyday). and with a ceo like zuckerberg one does not need to look under the surface to reveal that he is not so very much “about the people” than about being “ceo... bitch”. he probably is not a liar, but it is likely he is not being honest, either.