Jonathan Zittrain

I love Facebook — it’s a great way to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and it’s got a gorgeous interface.  It’s gone through several phases of growth, and the most important milestone — beyond opening up to the world at large instead of just people enrolled at a school — is opening up the Facebook platform for nerds at large to code.

Today’s kids who mess around with code are not writing software for Windows or Mac. They’re writing applications for platforms like Facebook.  There are well-known benefits to Web apps — generally all you need is a browser to use them; they work independently of your own PC, so they’re as good at a cyber cafe or school terminal as on your own; they connect to your online data — so you can work your Facebook friends into Facebook apps in any number of ways.

But there’s another key difference: apps written for PCs are not easily monitored or controlled by outsiders, even by the PC or OS vendors.  That’s why someone can write Bittorrent or Grokster, and even if the software were declared illegal, there’s no easy way to eliminate it.  Indeed — viruses are hated by everyone, including the users who have them, and they still persist.

Facebook and other Web platforms are different.  When a Facebook app has malicious stuff in it, it faces the Facebook Death Penalty. So when the Secret Crush app came bundled with spyware, Facebook simply shut it down – which meant all users could no longer use it, and no new users could install it.

And when a third party claims that an application can be used to break the law, Facebook can be put into the middle. Hasbro has demanded that a third party’s “Scrabulous” application running on Facebook be shut down.  (Scrabulous sure looks and acts a lot like Scrabble, so Hasbro might have a claim that the name is unlawfully confusing, and the patterns on the board are subject to copyright.) Facebook has yet to respond — but it certainly could shut down Scrabulous in a way that Bill Gates could never have dreamed of shutting down a Windows app.