charmed life

The War For the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 33

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

 

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

 

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I continue to think that Tim O'Reilly is a brilliant analyst.