Firefox & Facebook

Kirkpatrick, Marshall. 'Firefox Could Be the Real Facebook Challenger'. The New York Times May 5, 2009

Firefox has as many as three and half times as many users as Facebook. It makes sense at this point to compare browsers to social networking sites as they are converging in the future. Because Google created their own browser, firefox is scrambling for ways to innovate more. They are currently building a command-line-type Ubiquity system into the control bar that allows you to access your apps through your browser. It is looking more and more like an operating system as time passes. Firefox is bound to use the very large amount of people who use their browser to their advantage in a social networking way.
This is important for social networking as we see more and more technologies combine, they all seem to be going in the direction of incorporating a social network into their business. Social networking is continuing to take on new forms, and this will continue to happen in the near future.

This topic definitely fits in to what we were talking about in class on Wednesday. One would be able to predict how much better Firefox must be than Facebook in order to spread through the internet and replace Facebook's function. In that sense, it would have to be different from Facebook, but at the same time fairly similar. I would hypothesize that it would be fairly difficult to replace Facebook. My reasoning for this is that the social network, as it is online, acts as a locally clustered network. For this reason, it will be difficult to get 1 person to stop using Facebook because all of their friends use it. This is similar to the situation with AIM and MSN messenger. Very specific groups use each and they have not seemed to spread or change very much because neither service is superior enough to the other to cause a cascade. Moreover, I do not believe the internet has many bridges. Because I don't know exactly what the social structure looks like, I won't attempt to calculate how much better the new Firefox would have to be.

Society's reaction towards Firefox is funny because it has really built upon what companies think about themselves the most: their image.

This is why that nearly everyone uses Firefox on their computers regardless of its performance and speed. I know for Mac users, they don't really know the advantages for Firefox over Safari, especially when Safari 4 is coming soon. Most users just use it because their friends use it, and it's easy to switch over. They don't consider that Safari 4 is based off webkit.

The upcoming Google Browser for Mac and Linux, Chrome, is also based off the same base (webkit), and Google currently only has public builds of it for Windows, although the source code is out there to download and compile (have fun with that if you're thinking about it. my cousin compiled a mac version and it's really buggy. not to mention it chews about 8 GB to download + a few hours to compile). For you mac users interested but don't want to compile it, you can grab a copy here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eyliu/Chromium.zip

^ This code is about a month old (built the last week in March).

So, Google Chrome and Safari 4 are based off the same code, yet people are hyping about Chrome due to its feature set. If you analyze both Firefox and Chrome, Firefox currently has the advantage due to its add-ons, but the security system set is actually built better on Chrome than it is on Firefox. (See the pwn2own contest that happened this year.)

All Chrome needs is a add-on extension set (coming with 2.0), and Firefox may see its users fleeing. This will be interesting to watch once Chrome starts rolling onto other systems publicly and also when Chrome 2.0 is released. It wouldn't be very hard to switch because Chrome includes a very easy to use import utility to import from Firefox, Opera, and IE.

Now going back to Facebook users, this can also coincide with the uprising popularity of Twitter, which started two years ago. However, it wasn't popular then, and ever since it's uprising, we see that Facebook has incorporated a twitterlike feature using AJAX in their Home page. This has deterred some users like me to not use Twitter as of yet. I currently don't have a need to use Twitter as a main thing because I find it unnecessary ever since Facebook added the up-to-date status feature.

Apparently its not just Firefox that poses a risk to take down Facebook, Google looks like its going to come into the social network scheme of things.

Starting two days ago, on May 6th, if you open a new account on YouTube, it will automatically create a Google account for your. Or if you already have an youtube account, there is an option to link it to your google account. This post, http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/youtube-river-diverted-into-the-google-social-ocean-as-well/, made clear some of the implications of the new youtube/google account scheme. Basically with a youtube account now a part of your google account, you can get newsfeeds from people whose videos you may be following, etc, all while having your other things like contacts in the same place.

What this article gets at is Facebook and Myspace are very popular and one of the main reasons is that people can easily share photos. More recently, video sharing has been becoming more popular in the myspace and Facebook social network. Now imagine the largest video site in the world, YouTube, provides you with daily feeds of videos from your close contacts or whoever feeds you suscribe too. With so many more videos already on the site, YouTube will basically make the video feature on Facebook and Myspace seem archaic. First come videos, then maybe pictures will be next, soon the main aspects that made Facebook so popular will become that much better using Google's new social network system.

The writer of this CNet article ( http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235401-16.html ) explains how he wants Google to take care of all his logins and feeds from social network sites simply because he has so many of them. Google already took care of videos by linking YouTube accounts to Google account, soon it can make it link to various other social networks, making Google the central node which every network branches out from. We then start thinking of Google as the strongly connected component of all social networking sites.


edit: For some reason the techcrunch link points to the wrong article no matter what I do, if you search TechCrunch.com, the article is entitled "YouTube River Diverted Into The Google Social Ocean As Well"