Elsewhere on the web you can see fancy two-dollar words like “lifestreaming” and “the social graph”, but there will be none of that here — this is the story about how Facebook almost hijacked the internet, and how the internet fought back.

I got my first invitation to Facebook from one of my students in early 2006. I was already a reluctant member of that visual disaster otherwise known as MYSPAYZ!!1! and didn’t think much of Facebook, either. But as more of the people I knew hopped onboard I began to see some value, and soon I was busily posting cat videos, RSVP-ing to events and, of course, poking people.

And lo, did the great migration to Facebook continue… Youngsters who had never had an online voice of their own suddenly became prolific content creators through their uploaded media. I had one friend proudly proclaim to me that Facebook was “so much better than a blog” — in fact, I would argue that for many of my online friends their entire internet experience takes place within the confines of Facebook.

And that’s bad.

First of all, it’s next to impossible to get stuff out of Facebook onto the public internet. There’s obviously a lot of material I see on Facebook that’s never meant to be seen by strangers, but there’s also a lot of good content — promotional photos from live shows and uploaded short films, for example –– that would have a lot of value beyond the creators’ immediate circle of friends. And this internet is supposed to be about sharing, right?

The second issue comes with the fact that Facebook arbitrarily deletes content as it sees fit. Here’s a snippet from their own terms of service:

You understand and agree that the Company may, but is not obligated to, review the Site and may delete or remove (without notice) any Site Content or User Content in its sole discretion, for any reason or no reason…

Not exactly an encouraging environment for contribution, is it?

Fortunately, the real internet for grown-ups has struck back with free services which, on their own, might not be Facebook-killers, but together can duplicate the Facebook experience outside of Facebook.

And that’s good!

Status Updates, 0wn3d by Microblogging

The first unique feature I saw in Facebook was the status update. Entering a short blurb about what you were up to in a particular moment gave you an immediate and recurring presence on the network, reminding your friends that you were still alive.

Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and the like do the exact same thing, with the additional benefit of giving each short message its own page on the web, available to be found by a Google search!

Posted Items and Media, 0wn3d by Digg, Flickr & YouTube

The links you can share via Facebook’s Posted Items is actually pre-dated by Digg, the world’s first social network for sharing links. Other services like Reddit and StumbleUpon have since joined the fray.

For uploading media Facebook has one advantage in that you can tag your pics and vids with your friends’ names, alerting them in the process. But let’s face facts: Anybody who’s serious about photography has an account with Flickr, and the overwhelming majority of internet video is uploaded to YouTube. End of discussion.

Events, (almost) 0wn3d by Upcoming

As an active member of the local comedy community this is probably Facebook’s most valuable feature to me. Not only am I informed of upcoming shows, but I can see who else is going so I’ll have someone to sit with.

But what happens when I’m travelling to another city, or country even? Upcoming.org picks up where Facebook falters, offering a global directory of events organized by people I know, and perhaps as important, people I don’t.

I’ll have to concede that for now Facebook still holds the upper hand, but all it will take to shift the balance of power to Upcoming is to get more people using it.

The Wall, (soon to be) 0wn3d by Disqus (?)

Facebook’s wall is akin to the comments on this here blog — it’s really nothing more than a public conversation, except that on Facebook it ain’t public.

The promise of Disqus is a centralized source for all your comments posted across the web, and will be huge if more blog services join in… Are you listening, WordPress?

Newsfeed, 0wn3d by FriendFeed, MyBlogLog et al

The Newsfeed is widely regarded as Facebook’s killer feature. Everything you put into Facebook shows up in your friends’ feeds, without them ever having to leave their own page. But the feed is also Facebook’s most closely-guarded property. It’s almost impossible to get things out of there into the internet proper.

Fortunately, aggregators like FriendFeed and MyBlogLog (and others) can duplicate a Facebook-type feed of all the other previously-mentioned services out onto the public internet. This has transformed my own domain from a fugly static splash page of links into a dynamically-updated centralized source for everything I’m doing on the internet at any particular moment.

I’ve chosen to deploy both simultaneously for two reasons: (1) Redundancy – if one goes down the other will hopefully still be up, and (2) Whereas FriendFeed is primarily an aggregator of online activity, MyBlogLog’s primary mission is to build a community around your blog… That’s why that big green badge is there in my rightmost sidebar — feel free to sign up!

Another advantage of using an aggregator is that I can spread my feed out to other blogging platforms, like Blogger, Vox and Yahoo! 360°. This may seem pointless duplication, but you never know how people will find you!

So if, after reading this, you still want to keep to the walled garden that is Facebook by all means do so — just remember, Facebook is not the internet!

Unlike the many cat videos I rattle off for my friends on Facebook, a lot of care goes into each and every one of my blog posts here. Yet this grand old lady of teh interwebs is starting to look like a bit of a dinosaur next to the ever-evolving onslaught of microblogs. Let’s go in for a closer look, shall we?

I originally wrote about Twitter early last year. Its usefulness for me was quickly eclipsed by Facebook and the built-in status updates, but I’ve gone back to using it as a promotional tool, since each “tweet” gets it’s very own page, ready for indexing by Google and the like. Clever, eh?

Pownce comes from Kevin Rose, of Digg fame. It’s basically the same as Twitter but with the added ability to transfer files, and a premium version you pay for to transfer bigger ones.

If you’ve heard about Jaiku it’s likely because Google bought them. My knowledge comes from the very active network of Nokia S60 users on it. There’s a pretty unremarkable mobile client for it and a much better mobile-optimized web portal, but Jaiku’s trump card for me is the ability to add RSS feeds from other sites such as del.icio.us, Flickr and even this very blog.

Oh, and it’s also great for keeping up with the latest Nokia gossip..

FriendFeed is the current darling of the TechCrunch crowd, but it doesn’t do anything that Jaiku can’t — plus Jaiku pre-dates it. But I signed up for an account anyway. Hey, you never know…

My Plaxo account — which I’ll be keeping, by the way — has its own mini-aggregator feature called Plaxo Pulse. Apart from the ability to separate personal and business feeds (are you listening, Facebook?!) it’s fairly underwhelming in this current incarnation.

Of course any of these services are only as good as the people you know on them, and for that reason alone Facebook is still the champ. For now, anyway…

For my loyal readers who aren’t on Facebook, here’s what you’re missing — click the pencil-thin thumbnail to the right to see the results of my weekend experiment, wherein I tried to break my Facebook profile under the strain of as many stupid, bloated apps as I could find.

It didn’t work.

Note that the information presented in this capture is meant for entertainment purposes only, and does not in any way represent my personal beliefs and/or value systems.

I hate The Toronto Maple Leafs!

Online PIM purveyors Plaxo used to have a pretty bad reputation for spamming people from your uploaded address book and pressuring them to join the service. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case, as I’ve been testing Plaxo for a few weeks now and have yet to receive a single complaint about it from any of my five hundred-plus contacts. With their new “3.0″ service I can’t quite say that Plaxo meets the gold standard for “everything available on every device”, but it does look like they are the best of what’s out there if you’re not an ideal candidate for Microsoft Exchange.

For a quick overview of the service I’ll refer you to this online demo:

One big plus for Plaxo on the Mac is that I can use it to sync my Apple Address book and local copy of Thunderbird. You wouldn’t think this would be such a big deal but the two apps use completely different file formats, yet somehow Plaxo is able to seemlessly read and write between them.

Another benefit of using Plaxo comes from their partnership with LinkedIn (aka Facebook for business-types). If you’re on Facebook then you’ll already know that its value correlates directly to how many of your friends are there. It’s the same deal with Plaxo and LinkedIn — whenever my colleagues there update their contact info the changes propagate through Plaxo to the Address Book on my Mac, and I know enough folks who are listed on one or the other to make it worthwhile.

Where Plaxo stumbles is with its lack of support for iCal tasks. It might actually be due to Nokia’s own SyncML implementation; I know from previous PIM 2.0 tests that my events and to-dos are lumped together in the same database on my phone… But if Apple’s calendaring app can read them, surely Plaxo can too?

Oh, and about Plaxo Pulse… It’s this new whiz-bang feature where you can dump all your RSS feeds onto one page for all your friends to follow, but there are lots of other sites jumping on the same bandwagon. More on that in another post…

The times, they are definitely a-changing…

In years past my annual pilgrimage to the Bermuda Film Festival would be preceded by a many tedious hours spent on their website, cutting and pasting screening times and locations into a spreadsheet, reorganizing them chronologically and only then coming up with a suitable viewing schedule.

But now, thanks to a partnership with US and A-based film distributors/festival promoters B-Side, I have my very own user account for BIFF 2008, complete with calendars, space for reviews, even the ability to dump entries from this very blog for all Bermudians to see — though for some reason the imported content is not click-able. For shame!

About the only I can’t do with BIFF 2.0 is, you know, actually purchase movie tickets, but that feature should go live mid-week when seats are offered up to the general public. I hope.

So I’m reading intomobile’s coverage of a new service called Dashwire, which lets you manage your mobile phone’s contacts, photos, texts, web bookmarks and more from a single, handy web page. As an unabashed power user who regularly shuttles files and info back and forth from MacBook to Nokia someone like me would be the perfect candidate for something like this, were it not for one thing:

There is no way in hell I’m going to blindly turn over my precious info to a bunch of strangers, especially if it’s for free!

In my hiptop days I could justify having the same data stored on Danger’s remote servers because I was paying $20/month for the privilege of so doing — I could at least hope that some of that money was going towards keeping my data safe. But you have to wonder about Dashwire’s business plan, as the screenshots on their site are so cram-packed with info from your handset that there isn’t any apparent room for advertising. In fact, the only thing they ask for in return for their service is your mobile phone number, which we all know from my last post is something you should guard with your very life!

And then there’s mint, the award-winning Web 2.0 startup that offers “refreshing money management”. You just hand over your bank account and credit card info and they’ll give you free pie charts and spending graphs in return.

Uh-huh.

Either of these would make for a fine “traditional” application on a desktop computer — hey, I’d pay money for both if the price was right. But to take your sensitive data and stash it god-knows-where on the web behind a tarted-up facade of AJAX geegaws? I smell a scam.

Of course, I still don’t trust Gmail…