Facebook and social greed

A @rww post today on recently launched Facebook Places making location a commodity is yet another example of that social network’s unrelenting drive to dominate, nay own the social web.

Now there’s nothing wrong with that—if you’re inebriated with hubris and your beer belly betrays a sordid tale of wanton avarice.

But this brief post is not meant to stigmatize FB (ya, @so_char, it’s not all about bellyaching) since FB itself has done a splendid job of doing that through its own awkward mishaps.

Rather, Facebook’s oversized popularity coupled with a series of  knee-jerk like changes to its features make me think that social greed has come to typify its mantra.

ReadWriteWeb notes:

« While it’s true that there is value to the end user in the commoditization of location data, it’s a commodity that many location-based companies likely did not want. Until now, they’ve been able to compete not only on features, but also on the richness, accuracy and completeness of their own geo-location databases. That selling point is now going to disappear, thanks to Facebook. Hopefully, the location-based startups have a few other ideas for retaining their users in this post-Places era. »

Whether or not Facebook’s recent foray into geolocation will indeed stymie the growth of already established players like Gowalla and Foursquare remains to be seen.

That Facebook has set out to aggressively conquer almost every corner of the social space to date is indeed a testament both to its purchasing and staying power. Bravo.

Oddly, despite its incredibly powerful brand and mass appeal, Facebook strikes me to be more concerned about hoarding data than actually sharing it. The iconic face of social media it most certainly is not.

image sourced from lostinyourinbox.com