'Mediocre' Facebook Following AOL's Path

So now we'll be able to watch movies on Facebook. And play Angry Birds. And pretty much everything else, the way things are going. "Facebook is reaching its tendrils into every single thing we like about the Internet, far, far beyond the actual reasons we rolled up to Zuckerberg's site in the first place," writes Sam Biddle at Gizmodo. That strategy remind you of anything? Try AOL back in the 1990s.

AOL tried to be the everything of the Internet and flamed out in mediocrity. Facebook has big advantages—it's social and not as closed as AOL was—but the site's "also mediocre, because no company online can be good at everything and so it's always ugly when they try," writes Biddle. Zuckerberg's creation "wants to be Netflix, it wants to be your Xbox, it wants to be Foursquare, it wants to be Gmail—Facebook wants to be the Internet." But the Internet's just fine the way it is, with specialized sites. We don't need another failed web portal. Click to read the full column. (More Facebook stories.)