Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed | Hacker News Reader

Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed

scobleizer.com

18 pointsbdfh4215 comments

Why panic? AOL tried 'fenced garden' approach in its days and it did not work. Why should Microsoft/Facebook be any different? And AOL then had much larger relative market share than Facebook has today.

Apparently it did not bother people before that Facebook is not crawlable. If someone chooses to publish his stuff on Facebook, fine by me. One more thing to safely ignore.

As shown in the upcoming vs. facebook example in the article, ignoring Facebook is hard to do if you want to organize an event and get lots of people to come.

Is "Le Web 08" organized solely via Upcoming.org and Facebook, or do they have their own registration service? Many people might have seen the announcement on Upcoming, but might not have added their avatar to the listing.

I think random Google searches are also not the most common way to attract people to such conferences.

Exactly. Random Google searches aren't the way to attract people to such conferences. But an invitation from a friend with similar interests also attending the conference is! facebook 1, Google 0.

If you think about it, what is Google the way to do? Anything involving people, and facebook wins. Flickr is Google-searchable. Facebook Photos is not. But facebook Photos wins, at least among young adults.

If that's what people want... Email also isn't searchable, yet people managed to inform each other about conferences via email for years.

No doubt Facebook is a certain power on the internet. I still cling to the "social networks are like nightclubs" theory, though, and expect people to move on. I simply can't imagine Facebook dominating everything, because I personally don't like it.

If your friend tells you about "le web 08" in person you'll probably google it later.

It doesn't have to be either/or. You can put Upcoming's events on Facebook using either upcoming's or friendfeed's facebook app.

private message boards aren't crawlable either. there will always be a demand for a walled garden.

Good thing most of the value on the web is not contained within Facebook.

From Google's perspective, it's just one more pile of crap to route around, and it's your own incompetence at SEO if you put your valuable content behind a walled garden that can't be indexed.

This is how Google has the Blagowebosphere by the balls: it's very much in your interest for Google to be able to access all your content robotically at any time in any way it pleases.

This is serious business, people.

Why does anyone care what Scoble thinks? His prediction record is somewhat less than stunning.

Isn't it obvious by now that Scoble & A-list bloggers are just as clueless and hype-prone as mainstream media? Or are we still waiting for Silverlight to reboot the Web?

Scoble faces some of the same pressures and and incentives as the mainstream media; a need to be relevant, timely and first. It is what defines the 'A-list'; they are the bloggers who most resemble the establishment media.

That said, on this issue I think I agree with him, but my response is different; as a facebook refusenik and Crotchety Old Guy (Tm) I'm all for Microsoft borging Facebook and sinking into a giant quagmire of Suck; I just hope they don't take Flickr and the better parts of Yahoo! with them.

Pairing Facebook's closed data with a general search engine is probably a good idea, but what's missing from Scoble's post is why MS would need to buy Yahoo's search engine in order to do this. MS has their own search engine, which isn't as technically advanced as Google's but is probably on par with Yahoo's, despite it's much lower marketshare.

I don’t agree with Robert on this one. Google has billion of pages and data to crawl and index. Facebook data might still be worth; nevertheless it’s not that big of deal for Google to worry about. Microsoft already has an ad deal on facebook; I don’t see a rationale behind buying facebook for search

That XKCD comic was actually funny. I now have to rethink everything I thought I knew about the world.

It makes my brain hurt how dumb Scoble is. I've never done any heroin in my life, but every time I read Scoble it makes me want to find the fattest, rustiest needle I can, load it with heroin mixed with whatever mystery powders I can find, and jam the whole works as far as it will go right through my eyeball into an artery deep in my brain. Because feeling my brain dying from an intraventricular brain injection of way too much heroin, comet bleach, and flea powder would be better than how I feel after reading Scoble.

In this case, I want to replace my cerebrospinal fluid with dangerous narcotics and harsh industrial chemicals because of two particular stupid as fuck comments.

"We will never get an open Web back if these two deals happen."

Um. No. We will. Because microo!softbook will be a monstrous nightmare that will be plagued by a Vista-like level of incompetence of creating applications that are pleasant to use. Meanwhile, cool young people, who all have macs anyway, having realized that while their parents had to use shitty computers, they don't, will have already eschewed microsoft before it became the sterile chimera microo!softbook, will stop using facebook, because, hey, it's 2009 or 2010 and facebook was so 2003. Besides, it turns out that Ning in better and closer to the maclike good experience they expect anyway.

"This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than a week."

Um...this hasn't created any value. It certainly doesn't bring them into first place in a week. How do I know? Because I'm not a moron like scoble. In order for this to work, steve ballmer would have to successfully execute this strategy. Steve Ballmer is too disconnected from the experience of the end user to do this. He is not able to be the visionary and he's also not able to correctly recognize either this flaw, or the person who he should delegate the job too, as evidenced by the massive failures in Vista and the X-Box production problems. I don't mean to be trashing Ballmer, he's done extremely well for himself, but he can't lead this battle, and hasn't been great at delegating to people who can. God is in the details. Ballmer can't make them work.

That a guy who basically got his start licking microsoft's asshole with his tongue in public thinks it might work doesn't mean much.

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