I’ve been outside the Facebook walled garden for a while now.

People often ask me if I know what’s inside, pronounced “why aren’t you on Facebook?!” The question is always funny to me, because with a few free hours during finals of 2007, I wrote a Javascript worm on the thing giving homage to samy. Yeah, I’m intimately aware of what I’m missing out on.

What isn’t funny to me is how much Facebook is today’s AOL. I (and many others) have cracked the walled garden joke. Hell, it was my exiting wall post. But beyond real life pressure of people asking for your Facebook so they can stay in contact, I never encounter Facebook.

Facebook Login isn’t anywhere I care about. The +1 button wasn’t even useful when I had an account. And mobile apps only want your phone contacts.

No. Well, that’s not completely true. A friend visiting Korea was obsessed with Tinder. To use it, you need Facebook. Otherwise though, but fat goose egg.

Reflect on that for a moment.

Nothing except the weight of its already existing userbase is pulling me into Facebook. And I’m in Taiwan, country with the highest density of Facebook users.

In 1994, the number of users on AOL peaked at around a million. We’d call it “organic growth” nowadays. So, they started buying their regional competitors. They reached six million users by 1996. In ‘97 and '98, they bought CompuServe (for 3 milllion more users) and Netscape (because .com bubble). Finally, in 2000, they were reverse-acquired by Time-Warner and it all fell apart. (see Apple / NeXT for another famous reverse-aquisition)

It was the late '90s when I was working on Jabber. At the same time, my Father was working inside AOL on AIM related technologies. We had interesting conversations. But, that the full extent of AOL’s impact on my Internet life? I wrote the second version of icq-transport.

Facebook? Doomed. Look, they even unbundled their chat client.