We weren’t the only company to announce a platform last week. I’ll leave it to others to judge the importance of our announcement, but the more I look at what Facebook has done the more I become convinced that this is very big news, and an incredibly smart play.
The whole idea that the web needs a social platform feels very right to me. It’s ridiculous to have to re-create your social network on each and every site you encounter (flickr, linkedin, flixster, last.fm, and on and on). To have Facebook step forward and say “ok, we’re the open social network platform, come deploy your apps here against our plumbing” feels like it addresses a very real set of consumer desire.
Sure on a philosophical level it feels like the closed nature of this is perilously close to the CompuServe/Prodigy/AOL pre-Internet days and I do hope that there’s a day where some kind of open standard for these kinds of social connections solves the problem in a truly open way (FOAF++?) but until then I think Facebook has nailed it. And with 28MM engaged users they have exactly the momentum they need to be successful. I think there’s a good chance we’ll all look back at last Thursday’s announcement as the moment when Facebook truly stepped into their $2B shoes. Frankly, I suspect they’re already worth quite a bit more than that.
I think the interesting question is what happens to all the niche social networks? Sure, they can all move into a new home inside Facebook, but they’ll have to be careful to maintain some element of protectable IP. Let’s say for example that you’re a community focused around the love of movies. You move into Facebook with the new platform and start growing by leaps and bounds. How do you differentiate yourself from others with access to the same content (movie reviews, etc)? Seems tricky. Let’s say you go it on your own (don’t give your community over to the Facebook world), then how do you get people into your network? I sure would rather use a movie “app” that was deeply integrated into Facebook platform than one that wasn’t. Seems like a tricky place to be as a vertical social network. If you plug in you risk losing your real value (your network) but if you try to stay outside you miss out on the what I think will be a viral machine the likes of which we’ve not seen before. Sure seems that the social networking scene may turn out to be a winner takes all kind of situation. Should be fun to watch how all this plays out.
