Facebook Login and convergence
Friday, February 12th, 2010
John Gruber and many others have commented about this in the past day and I’d let it pass me by if I hadn’t seen examples of it first hand in people I know.
Read Gruber’s post and the link to ReadWriteWeb’s initial post: Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login and the comments under that post and you’ll get a sense of what’s going on here.
Facebook is in fact like the old AOL for many users and this is comforting for them but in fact, facebook is a site on the web among millions of others and these users don’t seem to get this. For them, facebook is the internet and they use it for everything: chatting, email, posting.
Couple that with the fact that many of these users use Google to search for everyday sites they visit (instead of using bookmarks) and you have a recipe for, well, not disaster but unknown humiliation on the part of many facebook users. Unknown because they have no clue how stupid they look. And, this is not just to knowledgeable people like Gruber or me but to anyone who has half a clue about the fact that facebook is in fact, just a web site among others.
It very well may be that the idea that users can sort out and choose the sources that they like, bookmark them and visit and/or track those sources is too much to ask of many users. They want a single place to go and that single place used to be AOL and is now facebook.
This is a type of convergence and it’s being driven not only by preference but by ignorance and that’s scary.
haa haa, totally funny comments. Now check this one and don’t come around complaining that you hurt yourself laughing.
http://failbooking.com
:-P
Dilip: Right, I noticed that in the Canon DSLR group on flickr but of course, we all have to be careful throwing stones, all of us are capable of misspelling or being dense.
However, this browser/internet confusion about facebook is fascinating to me and I think it’s probably more widespread than we know about.
Kind of reminds me of the arguments in this book: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier.
Andrew: Jaron Lanier is a visionary, very bright guy. He was on the NPR show I listen to quite often recently:
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/01/where-the-web-went-wrong
That cracks me up – never thought about it like that but I bet that is correct. I know a couple of people who just finally started using a computer because they want to be involved in Facebook and they appear to know very little other than that.
Pam: Right, that’s it. Maybe facebook should come out with their own computer that only does facebook. It would sell millions!