Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook
This is a challenging debate. What does it mean to be open vs. closed. And what would a service like Facebook look like if it was &quot;open&quot;?<p>&gt; the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval.<p>I assume this is based on the fact that you can not directly use facebooks APIs, and can not utilize Facebook itself. Facebook does allow for people to link out to other sites content, so in that way there is no barrier to <i>seeing</i> external sources in Facebook. An external site can&#x27;t extend the experience of Facebook though, but I don&#x27;t know of any successful web business that does allow this.<p>I&#x27;m curious of examples that actually meet the definition of open which he&#x27;s using. Almost all sites require a form of login, many news sites are putting up paywalls, and there have always been private services requiring login to get at secure data.<p>So, the openness that I think people want, is access to the Facebook user base, but I would argue that everyone already has that, in is the rest of the web. The difference is Facebook is not going to give that to any other companies, because that user base is their revenue stream.<p>To me this isn&#x27;t a problem until people are incapable of accessing anything other than Facebook. This would be like the AOL of 1992, before most AOL users realized there was more to the Internet than what AOL gave them. I don&#x27;t think people will want to go back to that. But competition will constintently pull on this. Email is not dead, Messenger is not the only messenging platform. Btw, I find myself barely ever using Facebook these days.<p>And a question, what sites operate in the way this article wants? There were no examples. Reddit?