It’s become a common trope to say that Facebook and Google are vying to become the operating system of the Internet. But there are some very clear hints of that in Facebook’s upcoming new design, which it just opened up to today in a developer sandbox. (You can see it at http://www.new.facebook.com, although you’ll need to download some libraries to start testing apps with it).
It appears that Facebook is moving closer to becoming a Webtop application, fusing elements of the desktop into the Web experience.
Eagle-eyed TechCrunch reader Ryan Merket (above) noticed something vaguely familiar about the new design. See the menu bar above his profile? Look closely. Its got some handy menus on the left that take him to his profile, his friends, applications, and inbox.
And on the right of the menu bar is a search box. That is the same visual metaphor you find in the menu bar on desktop operating systems.
The menu choices are different than on you desktop, because these tap into Web applications and resources. But the navigation is the same.
Menus on the left.
Search on the right.
And don’t forget the chat bar on the very bottom that, like a status bar, shows you how many of your friends are online and lets you chat with them.
Could this be the work of Facebook’s Parakey acquisition from last July finally bearing fruit? Parakey was the pre-launch startup from Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt that was working on a “web operating system.” Facebook was rumored to have beaten Google on the deal.
Facebook is already well on its way to becoming an operating system of sorts for the Web. (This time around there will be room for more than one OS). It is the application platform of choice for many Web developers. (Tomorrow, it turns one year old). But why reinvent the wheel on the user interface side when everybody is already trained how to use a menu bar? The aha moment will be when people click on those menus and a whole new world opens up to them.
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Seems you need the Developer application installed before you can view http://www.new.facebook.com
I’m really excited about the possibilities of this.
Interesting, but don’t you think being a leisure oriented service Facebook will have a tough time being the OS of the web ? I can’t imagine doing anything serious on Facebook.
Also, if that is the ambition, then why is this buried in user profiles and not on the homepage ?
I think a convenient way of organizing something is being made into a mountain.
still dull and boring …
but the real motivation behind this design is to increase page views by requiring many more clicks to see all the info, and each new page is a new ad impression. With millions of users, that could mean increasing page hits by hundreds of millions each month.
Erick - comparing FB to an operating system and an application development platform is a stretch. Similarity in navigation to a certain OS is where the similarities stop here. I would hope they’re making UI choices from studying user behavior, not because they want to be considered an OS.
And FB is not the application platform of choice for any developer I know. If it is, it’s because of the audience it surfaces, not because of the merits of the system in and of itself. Given the same (or even greater) capabilities but with a very small following, no developer gives it another thought. I’d call it an contextual application system first; it has a ways to go before I think of it as a true platform.
It’s not about being the internet operating system. It’s about Facebook/your social graph and its activities following you wherever you go online.
I can see an update to the FB toolbar that gives you persistant access to your FB world, FB IM and notifications etc.
FB Connect is a compliment to this.
Yesterday I noticed that a car is like a dog in that it has 4 wheels touching the ground. I proceeded to put some gas in Spike but I guess he didn’t like that cause he’s not playing fetch today.
Tomorrow I’m going to see if a bird is like a plane in that they’re both in the air.
@jro, last I checked, Facebook had more than 25K apps. Someone is making those.
Facebook is so bored…
@Erick,
Last I checked there were 29.7 billion webpages on the world wide web. The web is the platform; Facebook apps are just toys.
@ Mik, that’s nonsense.
Facts are the profile pages were becoming everything Facebook was not supposed to be. They were cluttered, hard to find info. MySpace-like.
The profile redesign sees two things
1) a return to the clean Facebook style of days gone by
2) a big fuck you to developers and apps (a good thing)
The menus at the top expose functionality that already exists, yes? So is Facebook becoming an OS by virtue of its UI design? That seems like a tough claim to make.
menus top left, search top right … yeah, that makes it an OS, lets blog it!
thx, you made me laugh …
This is kind of a stretch. A search box in the upper right means you are imitating an operating system? This is a convention I am more likely to think operating systems borrowed from the web, not vice versa.
I don’t think utilizing common user interface conventions is any indication of a business strategy. It is just good web design.
Alaska - wtf kind of dog do you have with 4 wheels touching the ground!?
@15
I don’t know, but I think it’s an operating system.
Facebook has always had OS ambitions. So does Google. That’s not new. What’s new here is that they are making UI choices that bridge the old OS world with the new one.
Make sense?
Haha. Facebook is a webapp that imitates an OS but it still lives inside a broswer. A webapp having chat, UI, and apps don’t make it an OS. It is like comparing you to an ape. You have 10 fingers and use tools just like an ape. So you must be an ape.
Silly article. Blog what you want but don’t blog what you think will get the most hits. You’ll lose credibility.
eagle-eyed reader Alaska Miller has pointed out that every application on his computer has a menu, and is thus an operating system by definition.
@erick no.
I just noticed that Firefox, too, has a search box and some file menus at the top.
DOS is the operating system for Windows which is is the operating system for Firefox which is the operating system for Facebook which is the operating system for my life.
I get it.
Tuesday: Log in to Facebook, notice that your profile reports that you’ve just reviewed some business on Yelp. Didn’t Facebook just get in trouble for Beacon? Are they really so stupid that they configured Facebook so you have to opt out of displaying off-site behaviors?
Friday: Read TechCrunch and see that Facebook wants access to my desktop, too. Laugh my freaking ass off. If I come across any bad Fugu they can have access to that. Or a clue - we should all be giving them those, since the poor guys seem to lack for several.
I don’t think this is what operating system means …
It’s a bird!
It’s a plane!!
No, it’s an OPERATING SYSTEM !!!
No, seriously, I get it. Facebook should buy Flock. The universe will be complete. Imagine the possibilities! Access Facebook, the operating system, from anywhere*!
*As long as it’s a computer or phone running Windows, Mac OS, or variant of Unix.
Erick,
I don’t buy your conclusion, do you honestly believe it yourself?
How about a web site adopting some metaphors that are familiar to a user from desktop applications. Seems an reasonable design decision to me. Flex applications did it for years now.
Why did you think some of the brightest individuals from Google jumped to Facebook? There must have been something really compelling that Facebook is planning, for them to even think about going from a multi-billion dollar company to Facebook.
Personally this is cool. But there will always be a question on “Revenue”. How will Facebook sustain itself or even make some money.
Facebook has done a great job of adapting well-known usable design to their site. Congrats to the design team. However, calling it an “operating system” is kind of silly.
@27 - yes…they have something very compelling - its called vested stock options at google and early employee stock options at facebook.
I don’t think people are understanding the article..
So you’ll boot your PC using Facebook OS?
“The aha moment will be when people click on those menus and a whole new world opens up to them.”
You need to get out more.
OS aspirations aside, the new profile UI is actually terrible compared to the previous design. The lone exception is the “Photos” tab view, otherwise the column width for reading is too wide and the lack of a border wrap does not allow the eyes to focus comfortably.
Had Facebook started out with this design in 2004 it would have not taken it as far as it has come.
Slim chance of anyone outside of the valley ever using Facebook regularly as an OS (even as the “OS of the Internet”). Facebook will be irrelevant in a few years time. It doesn’t excite anyone, and there is little value in any of the thousands of applications people have hacked together to feed off their current userbase. Time to move on.
So what does this “operating system” of yours do apart from helping me stalk the girl I met at a party last night?
I usually don’t post negative comments and I love TechCrunch, but…
Well it’s nice and clean, but a computer OS takes years to build and not anyone can do it. With Facebook’s “OS”, a similar UI and set of functions could be developed and rolled out fairly quickly by most web developers just as they are demonstrating. So if almost anyone can do it, are we supposed to be impressed with it? It’s still just a web page.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is awesome, but if I want to plug apps in something, I don’t necessarily want to be part of a social network.
Facebook will be an “operating system” when I can do everything I need to do on my computer directly within facebook. Until that time, it’s just a web site.
Google is far, far closer to an operating system:
- Searching/reading of worldwide, indexed information
- Email system
- Chat system
- Calendar system
- Office doc creation system
- Video viewing system
- Photo album system
- Mapping/location system
- APIs for 3rd party programming enhancements
THAT’s an operating system.
Why a web application will never be a an “OS”..
The platform you are developing, can change anything you want, and your app will break. These facebook apps, and myspace apps, are nothing but promotion for a real application built on a real operating system, that a platform will be independent of decisions made by zuckerberg, paige, and tom. There is no such thing as data portability, just ask Facebook. Opening up bookmarks/links within a page.. is not a OS.
Sometimes I wonder if the writers at TC just write things for the sake of writing, putting no thought into them whatsoever.
Discuss.
@Erick Schonfeld
Seriously, if you are going to write an article about operating systems, do your home work. Find out the responsibilities of an OS before you start bandying the word about. If you had, you wouldn’t have wasted your time writing such a bad article. At best FB is an environment to run an app that meets their specs. It is nothing more. Some of you Web 2.0 guys make me laugh, because a lot of you know hardly anything about the basics of computing, yet you’ll jump in there, and spot UI design patterns and proclaim a bunch of nonsense about a new OS on the way that shows you up to know almost nothing about computing.
So what if Facebook has 25K largely rubbish applications? How many business systems are out there in the real world, driving banks, driving multinational? You need to keep things in perspective, and pick up a book with the terms “System Software 101″ in them.
Oh god, this is RETARDED!!!
Swear to god it was Arrington’s post but he is delegating to his minions trying to recover some lost credibility.
Am I right Arrington?
@JerkCrunch
Thats the craziest crap I’ve read on a computer since I bought my PC.
Jeez, a whole bunch of illiterate or blind commenters on this thread.
What is the first word in the damn title of this post? “Hints”
Yeah, that’s right: “Hints of an operating system”.
Similar to when an evolutionary biologist, in a world of sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fish), observes the first amphibian and sees a hint of mammalian tetrapods. No one is saying that a salamander is identical to a simian, nor an emergent social operating system is equivalent to desktop monkey software.
Wake me up when their brilliant “OS” has at least one decent app someone would use for more than one minute, like a good RSS reader for example. Something with the quality of Google Reader or Shyftr.
Their “apps” are nothing more than toys.
Developers with some self-respect choose either web standards, OSX, linux *possibly* win32, or a runtime like Adobe AIR as platform. Companies developing for Facebook are doing it for the popularity, for the money. There won’t be good apps there, ever. Facebook is the place where you can find devvers who’ve sold out. Quality and Facebook just don’t go together. It’s logically impossible.
Funny thing is that I think they might actually think themselves they’re building something great… They’re totally out of touch with reality. But then, I can’t understand why anyone (that is, the developers) would have put any work into Vista. They should have called it quits after XP, make some extra service packs, that’s it. It’s history folks.
Actually Erick, by your reasoning, if I take the twin exhausts of my car an route them to come out at the front between the headlights, paint some scales on the body work, we’ll all be looking at, what hints at being, the next dragon! No! It’s a social dragon :o) It has feelings because someone developed a mood application for it!!!
The only thing FB has going for it is that everyone is on it. The social graph is their value proposition. Last time I checked, everyone I know also has gmail. So if google can get us to build our graphs then they will have power too.
The OS analogy isn’t quite correct. It may be a web social graph and communications platform. So you can get access to you graph from other apps. That could be valuable.
as an app owner I dont really like it. It hides applications. But at the same time it might decrease the amount of the crappy pirates vs ninjas apps and similar ones like that. I do like the photo tab though
Erick obviously isn’t suggesting that Facebook wants to become the technical equivalent of Windows, Mac OS X, etc. But Facebook has become an application platform just as Windows is an application platform. And this new design is very subtle and passive, suggesting that Facebook wants to give even more space to the applications it supports. Thus, the metaphor of an operating system.
The site prominently features its most fundamental functionality (universal menus, search, and chat — it is a social environment after all) and then steps out of the way. Compare this general redesign to the profile redesign, which gives even more full-screen space to applications, and the hints add up.
i believe facebook (and myspace) are for people that missed out on aol back in the day - i really do. its the same thing, minus the business model.
in a year or two - anyone with a profile on either of these sites will be laughed at.
facebook apps, myspace widgets = aol proggies
its all the same crap, rehashed.
Erick - Mark from TC - please stop using the word OS because you think it is a good metaphor. App platform and OS are two different things - you boys either want a headline or just dont have a clue. In either case - you are both dead wrong - Erick for writing such ridiculous commentary - and Mark from chiming in with such ignorance. - AND STOP debating this with your audience - you look even more ridiculous with every response to these comments.