Me vs. Mashable. How Facebook “Won” the Web. Really?

I couldn’t believe it. I think Pete Cashmore of Mashable (a website I enjoy) took a massive payoff of Farmville cash to write a Facebook puff piece.

I’m sorry Pete, but I’m not buying it. In fact, your first paragraph was so weak I couldn’t believe my eyes:

“Click the button, and the Web page is shared with your friends.”

Holy crap, I wish the web had this functionality before Facebook showed up.

“What's more, every "Like" you submit ensures Facebook (and its partner sites) can deliver a more personalized experience to you.”

Aggregate everything about me. I love sharing with "partner sites." This sounds a little familiar… like tracking cookies, which people pretty much hate... but now they are trying to legitimize it.

“Twitter, Facebook's direct competitor, has so far been unable to match the social network's growth rate.”

Wait... when did Twitter become Facebook’s competitor? Last time I checked, they were considerably different services. MySpace, yes. Twitter, no.  That’s like saying cocoa pebbles is competition for a filet migon, because they are both food.  Also, according to a February 2010 Techcrunch article, Twitter’s annual growth rate is 1,105%.  On the other hand, in 2009, Facebook’s growth rate was 144.9%.

“Not to mention that Facebook's button's are far more powerful: They tell a visitor how many friends have liked a story…”

Twitter, word of advice… make a retweet button that tells me how many people have retweeted something. And Bit.ly, do something useful and show me how many have tweeted about the same article that I tweeted.

Oh yeah, those already exist.

The rest of the article isn’t too bad, and he finally (and somewhat in contradiction) ends the piece perfectly:

“While Facebook is perfectly positioned to lead the next charge, success is by no means guaranteed…. And Facebook's user base is volatile: They may one day decide to embark on a mass exodus…”

Funny, I keep saying the same thing! I think an important takeaway is my point from an article discussing volcanos and social media: The ash crisis demonstrated that when the travel system is down, there is havoc. If the internet went down, there would be havoc. If Facebook went down?  People would just move on.

Social media was supposed to be about people making connections.  Now it appears to be about the open pillaging of our personal profiles (for our own benefit of course). To some degree, these mega-web-CEOs lead the way... but sometimes it's like they exist in their own web bubble, issuing decrees to everyone else about how web business will be run.  Inside the bubble, this news is huge and exciting. Outside of the bubble? Not so much, and I’m not sure I want Facebook squatting on my site. And let's not forget who will make the ultimate determination - the USER.  I like embedding a little Facebook friend box here and Twitter feed there, but something about this new “awesomenesss” seems perverse.

Of course, the next few months should be pretty telling. I’ll be experimenting with these new tools and who knows, maybe I’ll be writing the next Facebook adoration article.