Ever since facebook opened up its application platform, the blogosphere is full of hype paralleled only by the hype during dot com boom days. The hype these days is almost at the delusional levels, with valuations going to 100 billions. I am not an anti-facebook person. I use it extensively. As Robert Scoble points out, it is a modern day Rolodex for me. It is a pretty neat tool for managing my personal and business contacts. With the opening up of its application platform, facebook helps me with some of my social and business tasks. In this post, I am going to cut through the hype and put some perspective on what facebook is in realistic terms.

Facebook is definitely not a Google killer. Google is in an altogether different league from facebook. When I look at both Google and Facebook, I see that facebook is pretty good at attracting good developers but Google goes beyond that and it attracts good leaders and visionaries. Also, the focus of facebook stops at the level of managing an individual’s social graph whereas Google is focusing to manage all of world’s information. This difference in focus can explain how Google is of a different league from facebook. Having said that, I am not underestimating the role of facebook in this network connected world. My life in the pre-facebook world is different from the one in the post-facebook world. Facebook has had a tremendous impact in helping me better interact with my personal and business contacts. It has helped me reach out to people with whom I would have only dreamed of interacting in some conferences, that too if I am lucky. As Jason Calacanis says, Facebook is the best social networking product with the best design, UI and Platform. But it is neither a Google killer nor worth 100 billions at this point of time.

Recently, Kara Swisher, of All Things D, lashed out at facebook as an ecosystem meant for children. She was critical of the juvenile value of the apps in the facebook ecosystem. Teresa Valdez Klein argues that Kara Swisher is dead wrong and she feels that the platform will mature. Even though I agree with Teresa that Kara Swisher is wrong in her assessment, I approach it from an entirely different perspective. I don’t consider facebook to be a hangout joint (as Mathew Ingram portrays in his post). I see it similar to the world we live in. Our world has people waiting to die, retired people, people approaching retirement, people with middle age crisis, people with plans to create next Google, people aspiring to grow up and people who don’t know about growing up. Facebook also has diversity similar to the world we live in. How else it will be!! After all, facebook is a tool for people living in this real world. It has people of all ages doing things suitable for all ages. We also have control over who gets to be our friend in facebook. If someone is throwing a vampire bite on you and if you don’t like it, all you have to do is to block the person and remove from the friend’s list. It doesn’t make sense to term the whole ecosystem as nursery for toddlers. Facebook has some really “grownup apps” like Zoho Office Suite, Wikis, etc. One can use these productivity tools for both business and personal purposes. Also, you have the choice about adding friends and applications. You decide how your neighborhood (or social graph, if you are wedded to the term) is going to be. You decide the hangout places (facebook groups). Actually, it is a perfectly good ecosystem for both adults and children. One can see this picture if facebook is viewed as a virtual world than a hangout place. A hangout place might be segregated based on age, profession, etc.. But the world is a place where everyone lives together. Adults can also live in facebook.

There is another aspect of facebook mania which I want to take up in this post. I keep hearing claims like “facebook is a myspace killer”, “facebook is a bebo killer”, “ facebook is an orkut killer”, etc., many times in the tech blogosphere. These claims results due to the scarcity based economics and winner takes it all mindset of the people in the tech blogosphere. If you believe in the economics of abundance (which I believe in and it is the reason why I advocate open source and open standards) and if you believe in the diversity of people in this world, such statements will not come up at all. There is space for facebook, myspace, bebo, orkut, etc. in this world. With an increasingly networked world, having choices is a good thing. You don’t have to monopolize the world like Microsoft did in traditional software market, to be successful. You can coexist with your competitors and still be successful if you offer a good product/platform/service. A good free market system is one where the consumers (users) have choices. Reducing the choices in front of people, by artificially creating scarcity, is not the path to a good free market system. Once we understand this, we will also understand that facebook can be successful without actually “ killing” myspace or bebo or orkut.

It is time we get rid of all the hype (both positive and negative) about facebook and take it for what it is worth. It is a great tool. It has a great future. If they open up, they will have a greater future. It is neither a 100B dollars modern day miracle nor a park full of whining children. I hope we could salvage sanity in this facebook mania and get on with our life.

Cross-posted on Krishwords