Facebook Needs to Open the Newsfeed
FriendFeed has been stealing a lot of attention away from Facebook recently. Facebook easily steal back much of that attention in a relatively short amount of time. They could literally duplicate FriendFeed’s feature set and generate an unfiltered version of their existing newsfeed. Ultimately the newsfeed is theoretically open already since you can post news items via the platform API. With a little bit of hacking you could post your external news items to Facebook.
The rumor is already out that Facebook is opening up their newsfeed soon. Hopefully it isn’t too little too late. Then again, the majority of people are not actually paying attention to FriendFeed. It’s only the early tech adopters currently. There is a bigger problem with all of this social content though as Loic Le Meur pointed out yesterday. All of these solutions currently happen on other websites and not on my own.
In theory it would be great if we could manage all of the content from our own site and point to each others’ websites or profiles. Right now we have distributed profiles resulting in our information being spread across multiple sites. I’d argue that we will see the death of the profile from most sites and simply a link back to a single site. Perhaps that site will be Facebook or alternatively it will eventually be our own website.
While it will take a long time for the social web to figure itself out (if it ever does) Facebook is going to need to reclaim their leadership position in opening up the social web. Perhaps we will see a big announcement at the upcoming F8 event in San Francisco.
