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How Mark Zuckerberg Is Like Howard Dean

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by Felix Salmon
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Nov 02 2007 12:00am EDT

How Mark Zuckerberg is Like Howard Dean

Facebook saw its valuation skyrocket back in May, when it announced it was opening up its platform to third-party developers. Except... the Facebook platform isn't really open, as Marc Andreessen explained shortly after its launch. Now, Andreessen's Ning and Rupert Murdoch's Myspace have both signed on to the new de facto standard for social networking applications, Google's Open Social. It does everything that the Facebook platform does, and a little bit more, and it reaches an order of magnitude more potential users.

I'm reminded of when Vermont started allowing civil unions for gay couples – at the time, it was considered a great and brave and controversial thing to do. Nowadays, civil unions are the cop-out, weak-assed compromise: it's gay marriage which is the real issue. Similarly, the Facebook platform has gone from ahead of the curve to behind the curve pretty much overnight. My guess is that Facebook will (be forced to) join Open Social sooner rather than later. Its first-mover advantage has now become a liability.

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