Even the legendary Father of Cyberpunk, William Gibson shuns it:

I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.

Techcrunch sees it as a “Juggernaut” that it wishes would die. Is Facebook taking over the world? The answer is yes. At least for the next few years. And should we be worried about it? Yes.

In a highly influential piece in December’s Scientific American, Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, the “Inventor of the Internet”, Tim Berners Lee marks Facebook as a walled garden and thus a threat to the future of the Web as we know it:

Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform—a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

Although Berners-Lee refers to other networking sites, who the “central platform” is is obvious. Zuck’s baby has a “$35 billion valuation; 600 million users; 25% of all US Web traffic:

Facebook has become to the social web what Microsoft is to the desktop: mindbogglingly gargantuan, relentlessly mediocre, and almost inescapable. Like Microsoft twenty years ago, they will succeed because a bad standard is better than none: and like Microsoft ten years ago, they “innovate” by clumsily copying—and then trying to squash—the real innovators ” (TechCrunch).

Facebook’s bent towards control and dominance became once again apparent to me when I tried to post Thanksgiving pictures to my Facebook profile directly from Flickr yesterday. The MyFlickr app right to a MyFlickr custom tab page as well as on to the MyFlickr profile box, right? Nope. Facebook no longer allows custom tabs to profile pages (they can only be added to fan pages), and the MyFlickr profile box is gone from Facebook. So now the only way to put static pictures on your Facebook profile is to use their image uploading tools, which prompt users to tag everyone in a given image file. More rich data for advertisers.

Even the search monolith Google seems to be getting beat by The Social Network. The well documented cold war-like rivalry between Facebook and Google is about controlling your web time and keeping you within a particular network in order to increase ad revenues. While Google has the largest ad network on the Web, Facebook has the largest social network, and it is growing. Google announced recently that it will limit Facebook’s ability to let user’s access, and thus add Facebook friends from among their Gmail and Google Contacts. However, Facebook quickly found and published a way around the Google API block:

That huge sucking sound you hear is Facebook, piling data from third parties into its mouth as fast as it can while it remains stubbornly greedy about releasing its own data to anyone it doesn’t like. Which is mostly Google these days, since Yahoo and AOL completely surrendered and Microsoft actually owns part of them. – TechCrunch

Add that to Google’s thus far lame attempts at creating a social network – note the crash of Google Wave, and sputter of Google Buzz – and it’s clear that Facebook has the momentum. The Google | Facebook page is the first thing that shows up on a Google search of “Google Facebook”. I.e. even Google has a Facebook page, however, you don’t see a Google search tool anywhere on Facebook.

And Facebook now has Gmail in its crosshairs. Project Titan, the Facebook email program and “Gmail killer” will create @facebook.com email addresses for everyone and let you send emails from your Facebook inbox, thus keeping you on Facebook when you email. Add voice chat to that voice and you’d never have to leave Facebook to talk to anyone. Thus, the Facebook and Skype “deep integration” announced in October. For now, Facebook is embedded in Skype 5.0 for Windows, but imagine when you can make a skype call directly from Facebook?

Zuck discusses email and messaging concepts at Web 2.0 2010

But is this really a bad thing? Are the theoretical threats posed by monopoly real? Is “a bad standard better than none”? Tim Berners Lee warns that:

Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.

Tim Wu’s new book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” expands upon the analogues to monopolies past. A recent WSJ editorial summarizes that:

[P]eople like Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis and Thurman Arnold regarded monopoly as an evil to be destroyed by the federal courts. They took a rather literal reading of the Sherman Act, which states, “Every person who shall monopolize…shall be deemed guilty of a felony.” But today we don’t have the heart to euthanize a healthy firm like Facebook just because it’s huge and happens to know more about us than the IRS.