I realize that if you think the internet is like Hollywood, then Scoble is someone you’re supposed to hate. But don’t. IN FACT, back way the hell off and realize for a second that Scoble isn’t just someone to be parodied and mocked at the places @ SxSW where the techies do drugs. Scoble is a force to be celebrated. Scoble is a national treasure for writing like this :

When I heard the news I was walking through San Antonio’s Hard Rock Cafe looking at Kurt Cobain’s high school photograph. Wow. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook.

I quickly wrote a DM to Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, co-founders and said “call me.” They did, and I got one of the first interviews.

This is poetry. It’s charmingly quotidian at the top (he talks about the Hard Rock Cafe like he’s at Buckingham, and he mentions Cobain’s picture because it’s some kind terrible whitebread muse-talisman to him), but then just after this “oh, me?” scene setting, Scoble is brief and devastating in his establishment of douchey dominance — explicit and unquestionable.

He is the man who will speak about this here internet thing AND tell you the dudes’ names AND tell you that he used to hang with them before this cool thing happened, BACK WHEN THAT OTHER cool thing happened or was happening.

He’ll show you wtf is going on in this world. We should wipe the snot from his camera for the chance to be here. Luckily he lets us listen in for free:

Basically they did not tell me much other than FriendFeed would keep on going on for the indefinite future.

Scoble, no worries. I wasn’t expecting real information and was just glad that you had the opportunity to write this gem. I stand here, in awe, clapping quietly in my dusty corner of the internet. Bra-fucking-vo.

Facebook has taken all of about a week to come up with a new “governing document” for guiding the creation of its future EULAs through some kind of community-driven process, acccording to CNET News:

The thrust of the new plan is that future changes in the Facebook agreements with users will be put up for open debate in a process of “notice and comment.” The forum will be open to all Facebook users. If Facebook proposes a modification to a term of service that is uncontroversial or has limited feedback, it will get incorporated into the user agreement after a stated period of time. But if there’s argument or division over a proposed change, users will be able to debate them and ultimately vote on updates to the Facebook agreements.

Wait a second… online communities? Voice of the people in the creation of a defined user-powered space? I’m feeling some deja vu here. Better keep reading:

Zuckerberg also made it clear that the new governance applied only to fundamental issues of privacy and data ownership, and not the Facebook product itself: “There will be hundreds and thousands of product changes going forward, and that’s not what we’re talking about. This is about the rules and framework.”

Ah. Ok. that was it – I was thinking about openness in general. His whole use of the word “open” just sent me down this road of thinking about openness of data and openness of software. I started to actually imagine a day when I might consider uploading some of my pictures to Facebook instead of Flickr and MobileMe and JungleDisk. But then that came crashing down when I realized how much smarter FB really is than the whole general macro trend of data ownership over the last quarter century.

The process of deciding how FB gets to keep and use your data is what you’ll get some buy-in on now, kids! Yay! Don’t worry about ever actually getting to talk about having your data open – if FB wants you to have that, you’ll get that! “Just trust us”! Yay!

No worries on Zuckerberg actually, you know, getting it any time soon, I guess.

If this doesn’t make any sense at all, then take this as a thesis: the net is gearing up to become one big data mashup orgy. Standards like HTML 5 and products like Safari 4 and Flex and Chrome and Google Site Creator are going to punch massive holes in the garden walls of places like Facebook over the next three years or so, rendering all their attempts at locking-in user data absolutely laughable. Before you know it, we’ll be passing around self-signed data stores as business cards, looking at browser-created custom mashups of information, and using Twitter to comb interesting and titillating information out of the cloud. Sure nerds do this already, but I’m talking about everyone else – that will just be how the internet is. Might we still use Facebook for social graph management? Sure – but only if it doesn’t insist on being the center of our universe. Stick that in your EULA, Mark!

What are we to make of this?

I just have to wonder how hot FB really is if the VP of product management wants to leave. I mean maybe it’s just me talking from the worm’s eye view here, but if I were VP of product management for a company that people think is just super hot-and-sexy, I don’t think I’d want to give that up for a gig at a VC firm. Maybe I’m wrong — maybe it’s more fun to help pump $$ to marginally useful seeds in the rocky soil startups and drink lots of free drinks than it is to preside over the directionless morass that is Facebook’s product “strategy.”

More Facebook user fail.

Facebook has decided to block its system from Google’s Friend Connect, citing privacy concerns.

Arrington calls it the beginning of “the social network wars“. Predictably, he cuts straight to the cynical biz play that others failed to mention:

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.

It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.

In the end though, this won’t be that big a deal simply because people desire the kinds of data (lists of friends, movies they want to see, pictures of last night’s party) that they put into Facebook to be portable, and that’s going to happen whether Facebook likes it or not. The technology is against them. Scoble points to the market’s first proof of this – a company with the maddeningly “Web 2.0″ name Minggl:

Me? I think Facebook has a point, but I think the horse is out of the barn already and Facebook won’t be able to shove it back in.

Why? You should check into Minggl. It’s a toolbar that does far more than what Google’s Friend Connect does.

But it does it in a way that Facebook will never be able to block. Why? Because it’s your browser that scrapes all your friend’s info into Minggl’s browser bar. That bar then uploads all that information back up to Minggl. There’s no way that Facebook will be able to block Minggl. If Google wants to push the issue they should do exactly what Minggl is doing.

This, as I’ve said before, is where the Google advantage lies. They’ve embraced openness in format, API philosophy, and protocol (CalDAV, OpenSocial, Jabber are examples of each) and just started building a bunch of useful services, throwing more resources behind one thing or another when it starts to stick to the wall.

What we’re seeing the beginnings of here with this Facebook dust-up is proof that a big part of the likelihood of success for any given app is based on the data portability, and there are very few corners of the Big G’s web empire that don’t have rich API access (Google Analytics, I’m giving you the stink eye here). That inspires people to use Google services more and more, simply because you can base other software around it.

Facebook’s problem?

• 1) they don’t have that killer-combo ecosystem of apps and personal productivity stuff
• 2) they’re not going to get it from the community of “Facebook developers” that has lurched into existence since they opened their architecture a year ago
• 3) they haven’t seemed to have developed an answer to the fact that their audience could evaporate as soon as someone puts together a slightly better mousetrap.

Facebook depends on a user’s desire to do their social networking through the Facebook app, within the strictures of the Facebook interface, following the rules of the Facebook universe. Problem is, social graph data is a lot more personal than that, and people are just going to want it to be portable. Period. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have Minggl. (I hate typing that word).

As soon as people don’t have to use their data from within the sphere of Facebook itself, things start to go downhill for Facebook. Because there’s no other reason to use Facebook but Facebook. Google on the other hand can bring together a community of use around itself, making its docs and chat and email and calendar part of one grand information-sharing scheme that has elements of social networking.

Social networks are just a sort of design pattern for the web, like portals or – at perhaps a slightly lower level – forums. They’re not an end in and of themselves, and they certainly aren’t a business model for very long. They depend on audience, and Facebook is basically about as stable as a successful TV show. Once the creative minds stop hitting it, the audience will evaporate.

It begins — this is the first pebble announcing the avalanche from Google, the thing that will make everyone realize what kind of doo-doo shorts outfit Facebook really is:

Google has opened up a sandbox for developers where they can try building some new types of iGoogle apps not available to the general iGoogle user population. Most significantly, they can add activity streams (i.e., updates) and friends lists in new navigation panes on the page. Any change in a third-party iGoogle widget will be able to be reflected in the updates pane. (This has actually been a long time coming, since adding activity streams was always part of the OpenSocial plan). And they can also play around with larger “canvas” pages that users can click through to from each widget for a full-page experience. How very Facebook of them.

I’ve written on this before. If I hadn’t had a bottle of vinho verde along with a sweet, sweet chicken dinner tonight, I’d probably write more. But for right now, all I’ve got to say is that I welcome our benevolent masters in this arena even more than I have in others.