Facebook & its double standard on sharing
Mark Zuckerberg announced the Skype-Facebook collaboration yesterday and showed off a great product built by the Skype team. As he talked about the world, he amplified his long held belief that people love to share and sharing on Facebook will only keep growing.
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch lands mid-race: Facebook had been testing voice calling experiments since January 2011, had already folded Facebook integration into the Skype client back in October 2010, and TechCrunch reported the in-browser video chat partnership with Skype a week before the announcement. What is new today is both the shipped product and Zuckerberg's framing of it around his 'law of social sharing' — the claim that people share more each year.
GigaOM's angle is the tension in that framing: Zuckerberg preaching maximal sharing while Facebook keeps its own graph closed, a critique sharpened by the same-day comparison of Facebook's and Google+'s video chat tools, which puts the feature head-to-head with Hangouts at the exact moment Google+ is courting developers and users with more open rhetoric.
First-order effects
- Facebook users gain in-browser one-to-one video calling powered by the Skype-built product, no separate client needed — a direct counter to Google+'s Hangouts as Google+ courts early adopters.
Second-order effects
- Google is pushed to differentiate Hangouts on group video and openness rather than one-to-one calls, making the sharing-versus-closedness argument a competitive weapon for Google+, not just a critic's talking point.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms will compete on bundled synchronous communication — chat, voice, video inside the feed — while their data-sharing policies stay asymmetric, keeping privacy backlash and regulator attention on the agenda.
The trend: Social networks are shifting competitive ground from the news feed to built-in real-time communication, even as their positions on opening their own data diverge.