Facebook Platform
I just saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address from the Facebook developer conference. They have just announced a radical new platform for deploying social network applications, and I believe they are poised to take over the world.
I have been fascinated by the implications of online social networks since Friendster hit the scene. Friendster suffered from small-mindedness about the possibilities and has been overrun by the competition. MySpace is the current champion, but they suffer from small-mindedness about third parties playing in their “territory.” Not to mention that MySpace is just ugly as damn. I have always appreciated Facebook’s clean design, but until now I only used it find out what kind of parties my son’s babysitters go to.
The web exposes many contradictions, and one of them is that on the one hand it is a democratizing, “flattening” phenomenon, giving individuals and small groups a medium to communicate with the same reach as gigantic corporations. While on the other hand, the web also benefits from monopolies. A site like eBay is more valuable to everyone because everyone uses it. Amazon.com has such a wealth of information because people would rather write their reviews there than in a second-tier space. Up to now, the problem with social networking applications is that each one requires you to build your connections, your profile, your network up from scratch. What the web needs is a de facto standard social network. Of course, each one of a thousand of competitors has been scrambling to be the Big One.
What makes the Facebook announcement so exciting is that they are opening up their enormous network to nearly unrestricted access by third party developers. This means that an entrepreneur can create the next great viral application without having to lay the groundwork of building yet another social network and drumming up the critical mass necessary to have a hit. To be sure, you will still have to compete for attention on the Facebook platform, and the competition will be fierce, but the flywheel is already spinning. This is how low the barrier to entry is once your application is running on Facebook: someone clicks a link to your app and it becomes a part of his suite of Facebook applications. When he publishes something cool with it, all his friends are notified and if they want the application too, they just click the link… Wash, rinse, repeat.
Zuckerberg reveals some pretty astonishing facts about Facebook: at present, their signup rate is 100,000 new users per day. They get 24 million unique visitors in a 30-day period. And this one amazed me: 50% of those login to the site every day.
Here’s a prediction: in very short order, a third party developer will introduce an app on Facebook so successful, that Web 2.0 startups everywhere will suddenly decide to become Facebook startups. This is a positive feedback loop with enough generative power to turn MySpace into a footnote. It’s too early to call the race, since MySpace still has a lot of weight to throw around, but the Facebook people clearly get where this can go, and they have just lit the fuse on a rocket sled.
A couple of closing remarks: Whenever the subject of Facebook comes up in education circles, I just hear paranoia and fear. The grownups want guidance on how to make it just go away. Well here’s the thing: Facebook is no more or less safe than the world we live in, and we are perfectly capable of behaving accordingly. The question we should be asking is “How can we use it to make the world a better place?”
Final note: At one point in the talk, Zuckerberg says something like, “We don’t have a large development team. There are only 85 engineers…” I had to laugh. How do you get 10 people pulling in the same direction, let alone 85? I encourage you to sign up and play around for a while. It has the cohesiveness of something built by two people, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Comments
Hey Zach, Cool article and some very good points. The idea of a very large social network or a defacto one is interesting especially when you make the comparison with OS. You have 3 large OS the Microsoft one, Apple, and Unix based ones. Essentially Facebook or MySpace are like the OS of your digital lifestyle whether it is in communication (messaging, email, forums..etc), entertainment (photos, video, music..etc), storage and services (eg. TrustedPlaces). Question is are we moving towards an ecosystem where you have those social network OS and families of widgets and third party providers or are we moving towards loads of social networks interconnected via widgets and a common ID process such as Open ID.
I think we’re still in the very early stages to be able to make a judgement of what is to happen. However my best guess is that we’re increasingly going to see consolidation in the market and small social networks either dying of or re-inventing themselves as third party providers to the larger social networks.
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