Facebook is Too Damn Powerful

Look on the bright side, Facebook: you saw a massive spike in traffic Thursday evening. Unfortunately, it was all going to an error page.

Another bright side: the web-wide Facebook redirect crisis — which essentially hijacked users of CNN, the HuffPo, Hulu, Kayak, Mashable, NBC, the Washington Post, Yelp, and every other one of the more than a million websites that lets you use Facebook to login — didn't last longer than oh, 25 minutes.

You helpfully pointed out it was a "short period of time" in a quick, unapologetic statement after the glitch was over. "The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual," you added.

Nothing to see here! Panic over! Go about your business, Internet!

We wouldn't be surprised to see another, later statement with something closer to an apology and an explanation. No doubt everyone is scrambling behind the scenes to figure out exactly what went wrong here. More important is the discussion that needs to happen between the rest of us.

For the citizenry of Internetlandia, this brief earthquake — whether you experienced it personally or not — should be a wake-up call. Yes, it was 25 minutes or less. Yes, all you needed to do to take care of the problem was log out on Facebook. Real earthquakes last for seconds, and people in earthquake zones know the safest places to go when they strike.

But earthquakes also tend to spur a lot of discussion about whether our infrastructure is safe. And rightly so.

The problem here is that so much of our infrastructure is just lousy with Facebook plugins. Plugins to login, plugins to comment, plugins to Like that page on Facebook. And that's fine! I've used all of the above. I love that I rarely have to think about logging in to any site anywhere.

But we'd better start thinking about the monoculture this has created. Because apparently, at least one of those humble Facebook APIs had the ability to take millions of users away from the page they were trying to look at and redirect them to a Facebook page.

This wasn't an outage. It wasn't a denial of service attack, or a virus of any sort. It was something new in the universe. Call it a Facebook Black Hole. Not the kind you fall into when you're checking what high school friends are up to; the kind that has the potential to suck a million websites in.

No wonder many of the first tweets to respond reached for classic sci-fi "rise of the machines" metaphors:

Remove Tinfoil Hat

They were kidding, of course. Facebook isn't Skynet. It isn't HAL. It isn't even the evil money-grubbing, privacy-snubbing company that many critics take it for. It's just an increasingly large group of talented engineers who think of themselves as fast-moving hackers and have reached an unprecedented level of users — one billion active users and counting.

Therein likes the problem. Facebook has become pretty much the largest, most-widely used thing on the planet that isn't some sort of public utility. We regulate our air, our water, our electricity, our mail to make sure bad things don't end up in them. We regulate our Internet providers, and are eager to make sure they don't start charging us more for certain kinds of traffic.

But as far as our #1 social network goes, it's pretty much the Wild West. Now there have been attempts, with successful class action lawsuits and the FTC privacy settlement, to rein in the site's excessive experiments. As soon as one potential excess is settled, however, another pops up. This is a company that is openly determined to "move fast and break things," in one of Zuckerberg's favorite phrases. It's acting like the very antithesis of a utility.

No guardian of the public interest has even started to look into these APIs, the tendrils that reach into every corner of the Internet. The best you can do is block them outright with browser extensions such as Facebook Disconnect.

It would be a shame if such tools were to become widespread. But if Facebook Black Holes occur again, there may be nothing else for it.

I suggested in my Facebook predictions for 2013 that this would be the year the world discovered what sort of service — what rowdy bunch of change-happy hackers — it has invited into its lives. Now it seems that's starting to play out.

The questions remain: will the benefits outweigh the breakages? Will Facebook realize it needs to start acting like a company with a billion users and handle with care? Or will its global power, so effortlessly gained, be wrested away from it by regulators?

Source : mashable