Today, we are officially calling the end of Facebook's reign and the rise of the Friendfeed model. In the end, open, transparent, flexible, and uncompromisingly adaptable wins over closed, walled, proprietary. AGAIN.
All this clamoring to "Connect" suddenly is the last desperate grasping. "Oh wait, we didn't mean to be "that" Closed." Grasping that may last a couple years; nonetheless, AOL-style Game Over.
The analogy of Apple's success is often paraded as a kind of ultimate victory for the closed and proprietary, but what is MacOS actually built upon? A custom version of an OPEN *IX OPERATING SYSTEM. Underneath it all, is essentially BSD, right?
So Apple is actually the ultimate triumph of OPEN SOFTWARE PLATFORMS with the option of building unique, custom, supported builds. It is also the triumph of USER-CENTRIC DESIGN.
Friendfeed is the current social web fire hose most headed in that direction; however, whoever can blow away Friendfeed's HUMAN INFORMATION PROCESSING (HIP) interface, could knock them down a notch in a matter of weeks or months.
Yep, we're also today asserting first claim upon the Era of HIP UI. The bottleneck has become Human Attention and Human Information Processing capabilities. As humans, we each possess varying asymptotic natural aptitudes; however, we share the fundamental ASYMPTOTIC characteristic of reaching a point beyond which we simply CANNOT EFFECTIVELY PARSE, UNDERSTAND, AND SYNTHESIZE *MORE* KNOWLEDGE per unit time.
Call it "Peak Cognition" to play on the peak oil phenomenon. This point is relatively tangential here, yet fundamental to where we go NEXT. Everyone knows where we've BEEN. What we want to know and must DECIDE is where we choose to GO, from here. It's not written in any stars, it's created in our every day CHOICES.
NOBODY can predict the future; rather, every day we contribute to BUILDING our future. So, you can simply ask yourself, which future am *I* building today? Is this really the future I want? If not, STOP IT. Make a better choice.
Bottom line for this post: Facebook's Fleeting Billion Trillion Dollar Moment has passed. Zuckerberg missed it.
FAIL.
