How long will Facebook survive as the world’s de facto social network? Five years? A decade? Fifty years? Longer? I’ve been asking myself this question, and I think to attempt a prediction warrants a brief history lesson.

The electronic networks of twenty years ago, and their corresponding silos of data and user interaction, were remarkably similar to the social networks of today. Except there was no web, and the mobile internet meant you had to carry a laptop the size of a suitcase with a modem the size of a Dostoyevsky novel. There was AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. And there were bulletin board systems (BBSs). These were communities, from the hyperlocal to the nearly anonymous. They were walled gardens in every sense of the term, loosely held together by now-abandoned protocols like Usenet, Gopher, Archie and FTP (still used, but effectively obsolete. It’s worth noting that email is a survivor; why it survived is an interesting question, and I don’t see it going anywhere soon).

Then the web, built upon an open document-oriented architecture, allowed anyone to publish content for the world to see. It was a distributed, decentralized, open field. It matured into a platform for applications, and with more bandwidth and cheaper computing power, shifted much of our computing activity back to the server.

This resulted in platforms like Facebook; it’s now the de facto social network on the internet, and is fast approaching a billion users. Facebook is a lot like a really big BBS, or AOL, if any of those services had eventually registered one in seven people on earth. It even offers its own email service now, which interestingly was often the draw of early AOL users twenty years ago.

Computing is no stranger to these types of cyclical macro patterns. The centralized mainframe world of the 1960′s gave way to the decentralized microprocessor-driven PC world of the 1980′s and 1990′s. Now the iClouds, DropBoxes, and Google Drives of today resemble in many ways the mainframe architecture of fifty years ago.

But what about cyclical patterns on the social web? Will the walled garden of Facebook eventually give way to something that resembles the open field of the web? Or will Facebook dominate our data and social interactions for decades to come?

Recently at an event I managed to ask Tim Wu and Clay Shirky about all this, and what they said surprised me. Since Facebook was preceded by MySpace, and Myspace by Friendster, and Friendster by GeoCities (or whichever predecessor you like), isn’t it reasonable to think that Facebook will soon be supplanted by something else altogether? They both seem convinced that Facebook is so deeply entrenched with its user base that it will survive for decades to come — maybe fifty years or more.

But there appear to be cracks in the garden wall. Recent arrivals like Instagram and Pinterest, which have seen incredible growth, seem to challenge this position. I think Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1B ($300mm in cash and $700mm in stock) validates the idea that challengers can appear quickly, and adopt enormous user bases with transaction costs approaching zero. And so far Facebook seems less adept at the mobile user experience as compared with mobile-specific platforms like Foursquare and Path. Being too closely tied to the desktop browser seems like a significant long-term risk for Facebook, but perhaps it could coexist with those rivals as it’s done so far.

In the scenario of a patchwork of emergent, quickly-growing niche networks, Facebook may eventually evolve into a new layer on the stack: the authentication layer, where it becomes the arbiter of our digital identities. (In many ways I think Facebook is already a de facto authentication platform; try launching a new website without a Facebook login option and see what happens.)

Does this put the open internet at risk? Will Facebook really be around in fifty years? I’d be curious to hear what any of you think.

It might sound like a strange question to ask. Most eulogies of Steve Jobs have described him alternatively as a technologist, innovator, or inventor. I’ve seen several recent (and ostensibly charitable) comparisons to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. His brilliance is without question. But I tend to think of him as more of a Vanderbilt or Carnegie than a Tesla.

The brand loyalty enjoyed by Apple is a remarkable feat of advertising, product positioning, and design. The breadth and depth of such loyalty rivals that of a major religion. Owners of Apple products (or those who aspire to be) surely number in the billions. The lining up of Apple’s adherents at each successive product launch invites cultish comparisons, which this recent string of Samsung ads has cleverly exploited.

But Apple fans’ loyalty often coexists with an ignorance of the firm’s vicious IP protectionism, which goes above and beyond defensive self-interest.

Example: Users of HTC phones will soon be unable, due to this recent patent ruling, to add a calendar entry by tapping on mention of a corresponding date and time in the device’s email reader. Or to tap on a phone number to initiate a phone call, even if such a feature is laughably obvious. And if those features sound insignificant enough to shrug off, consider what other basic functions and wholesale feature sets Apple would be eager to claim as its own, or prevent other firms from implementing. Apple’s position is dangerous and harmful to the tech community at large.

It’s true that many of Apple’s peers also claim extensive patent protection (some more novel than others); this is largely due to an ineffective and outdated patent system which undoubtedly will require organized and informed legislative action to remedy. Patent defensibility probably played a role in one of the biggest tech acquisitions of 2011. But the position taken by Apple is inordinately abusive of such a system, and is contrary to the conditions that enabled its founding.

The attitudes that were emblematic of Silicon Valley at that time are essential to the tech community at large and a healthy democratic society, which depends on mobile, social, and networked technology to enable its next generation of innovators.

Welcome to Path, the mobile-only platform which seems to have successfully pivoted from a location-based photo sharing app to what I think could become a serious alternative to Facebook. The catch is that you’re limited to the Dunbar-inspired limit of 150 friends.

This is no all-purpose social platform. Path lacks a web interface, tablet app, public profiles, and the friend-categorization features now common to g+ and Facebook. It’s basically a timeline of check-ins, updates, and media which encourages tagging of others. This to me seems to suggest a highly focused and potentially valuable set of social data, which doubtless is part of the monetization strategy and otherwise remains a mystery.

This week I’ll be on vacation in the Florida Keys, then off to a wedding before flying back to NYC after the new year. I’m going to try an experiment in using Path as my primary check-in and photo sharing tool and pushing updates to my other profiles. Let’s see how it works out.

The reason my website was down, it turns out, is because of a port blocking issue in the security profile of my EC2 instance at Amazon Web Services (#firstworldproblems). Whichever genius bar dropout thought that blocking port 80 by default would be a useful feature is deluded (whoever you are, you’re not making the world any more secure; you’re just causing thousands of people to wonder why their server isn’t responding).

Tech pundits, would-be stalkers, and obsessive ex girlfriends: port 80 is now unblocked, and you can all breathe a little easier.

Image via Wikipedia

Ever since the death of newspapers became a thing, there seems to have emerged a collective “holy shit” moment among newspaper publishers, reporters, editors, and readers.

But if you attended last week’s Lotico Semantic Web Meetup at the NYTimes, you would have come away thinking you were among the architects of the digital 21st century rather than those of a crumbling institution of the analog 20th.  Presenters from the International Press Technology Council (including Andreas Gebhard of Getty Images, Stuart Myles of the Associated Press, and Evan Sandhaus of the Times) discussed the newly-defined rNews standard, meant to represent structured news-related metadata on the web.

Elsewhere at the Times, an outfit called the Research & Development Lab (operating out of what one might imagine to be a repurposed Crying Room) is working on some very cool data visualization projects.  The team’s Cascade project was recently written up on Mashable and renders the propagation of social activity via twitter.

This is the kind of stuff one would expect to come out of IBM or Microsoft Research.  And all the more surprising — and impressive — given the Times’ financial state.  I’ve always thought the future of a publishing giant like the Times is to become a platform rather than a product.  These kinds of innovations are what will make that possible.

This is an older TED talk, but one of my favorites. Pinker makes the thought-provoking point that ambiguity and vagueness in language can be remarkably useful.

Steven Pinker on language and thought | Video on TED.com.

Encountered along a road next to a military base in Bangalore.

As seen along the mountain pass from Reykjavik to Hellissandur. Taken January, 2011.

A rare opportunity to view the structure from this angle during a promotional event by the developer of the condominiums that will soon replace it.

Image by reallocalcelebrity via Flickr

Whitney Hess links to an innovative use of Hashable to derive a social graph visualization based on interactions of people at South-by-Southwest earlier this month.

Interesting things seem to happen with the social-mobile-visual intersection.  Remind me again – where are my augmented reality glasses?

Visualizing First-Time Interactions at SXSW.