When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up
Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. For many no access to Facebook means loosing connection to everything including services essential for their offline life. Even in a very developed EU country I already happen to face cases when something is only available via Facebook because some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank).This is a very serious problem - hyper-centalization in hands of one corporation which can fail you intentionally or not. Facebook is becoming sort of the Chinese system (AFAIK standard WWW is almost nonexistent in China, they mostly use apps within social networks which are easier for the government to control) for the whole world.Looking more broadly it's another layer of the malicious trend to wrap the things in more and more layers.First we had native desktop apps (which always could communicate data to network servers). Then we have wrapped the apps in the browser (which essentially is an OS on an OS) but we had our pages on independent servers. Then we invented "social networks" and are putting everything in there.We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers. We could stop here, use the standard WWW and improve experience of using RSS/Atom/RDF/XMPP/etc but we gave up our pages/subscriptions/contacts to Facebook.