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By Caroline McCarthy
news.cnet.com
April 21, 2010
I once got into a debate with someone over the proper pronunciation of "F8," the
name of Facebook's sort-of-annual developer conference.
I pronounced F8 as the letter F followed by the number 8, saying I believed the name
referred to the fact that the event involved an eight-hour "hackathon" right after
the original debut of Facebook's groundbreaking developer platform. My partner in
conversation, himself a developer, said he'd assumed it was pronounced "fate."
Correct or not, he had the right idea. The logo for F8 2010, appropriately enough,
depicts a tiny F next to a massive 8 in a black circle that evokes the
fortune-telling billiard ball of yore sitting atop a complex map of what appear to
be random points and connections.
This year, more than ever, F8 is going to be Facebook's pitch to developers,
advertisers, and the world: You are destined to be part of our Web, and our
universe.
Though the company's formal libretto of announcements has yet to be released, all
signs point to F8 2010 as a place where Facebook will chart its next great land
grab, asserting its impending dominance over online niches the company does not yet
control. There may be an announcement about geolocation, the GPS-fueled craze that's
currently owned by start-up Foursquare. There will likely be more news about
"Credits," Facebook's gaming-focused virtual currency system.
There is expected to be further detail about the "universal 'like' button" or
toolbar that Facebook plans to release to third-party publishers, and probably more
about "Community Pages," a curious new feature that Facebook announced earlier this
week.
Facebook wants to be everywhere. The "like" button announcement signifies that
Facebook Connect, the big product release from F8 2008 (there wasn't one in '09--no
reason given), just wasn't enough when it comes to Facebook's presence across the
Web. It's also got fresh competition from Twitter, which may prove to be Facebook's
strongest competitor since it tasked itself with unseating MySpace in market share.
At one point, everyone expected Facebook's eventual big rival to be Google, which
instead has tallied a history of social-media missteps.
Last week, Twitter held its first-ever developer conference, called Chirp, and all
signs point to the microblogging company evolving far beyond a parade of
140-character messages from tech pundits, celebrities, and news outlets. Twitter
plans to launch metadata annotations, a geolocation directory, its own URL
shortener, and potentially more internal applications like the mobile clients it
announced for iPhone and BlackBerry.
Facebook's response to Twitter's growth: Grow bigger. That's what we'll be seeing at
F8.
But as with any bold, brash, go-forth rhetoric, there has been extensive scrutiny of
some of Facebook's practices that highlights the company's status as hanging
somewhere between innovative, can-do start-up and Google-like thousand-eyed
conglomerate. It's a level of critique that Twitter, which Facebook once tried to
acquire, hasn't achieved yet.
Much of this has to do with privacy. Anil Dash, the former Six Apart evangelist who
is now in charge of "government 2.0" nonprofit Expert Labs, posted to Twitter on
Tuesday: "Will someone ask (CEO Mark Zuckerberg) why he doesn't use Facebook's
default privacy at F8 tomorrow? If it's not good enough for him then why's it OK for
us?"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation also expressed deep concern over modifications to
Facebook's privacy policy released in conjunction with the "Community Pages"
announcement, as well as worries about how the new product ties into members' listed
interests on Facebook.
"The new connections features benefit Facebook and its business partners, with
little benefit to you," a blog post from EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl
reads. "But what are you going to do about it? Facebook has consistently ignored
demands from its users to create an easy 'exit plan' for migrating their personal
data to another social networking Web site, even as it has continued--one small
privacy policy update after another--to reduce its users' control over their
information."
There has been industry concern, too. Earlier this week, a coalition led by
instant-message software company Meebo launched XAuth, which Meebo describes as "an
open framework to enable the social Web," but which really means "a non-proprietary
alternative to sharing on Facebook."
Industrywide attempts to create reactionary products to Facebook's have not had the
greatest success. After Facebook launched its developer platform three years
ago--has it really been that long?--Google soon was spearheading a project called
OpenSocial, designed to create a universal alternative to Facebook widgets. In the
wake of Facebook Connect's development, Google launched Google Friend Connect.
Facebook has eclipsed both Google initiatives, and though Google's Buzz service is a
partner in XAuth, it's Meebo that's doing the PR work this time.
But so far, Facebook has been unstoppable. And the sheer breadth of expected
announcements at F8 2010 will likely be some kind of indicator as to whether this
streak will continue--or whether Facebook's ongoing land grab has encroached upon
hostile territory.
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