(Writing in a car on the way back from Vermont)
Inspired by a few back and forth twitter conversations, I am more convinced than ever that the future of Facebook is an open networked ecosystem to manage your life online. Sharing on Facebook is already becoming more of a broadcast. The broadcast nature of the platform will lead to more connections being made and the need to continue to open up certain channels to create even more connections and allow Facebook more revenue opportunities.
What leads to the this open ecosystem? Developers creating applications that break down the walls of friends and find more ways for people to connect. A good example is the early facebook application market. The rules of engagement have less to do with your friends and more to do with your associations. You broadcast your favorite football teams and share your favorite moments with non-friends on applications like Water-Cooler or Graffiti.
Other examples of how Facebook has evolved over time to be more of a broadcast platform than sharing among a small network.
- Opening up the network to the world that is outside of the people that have a college email.
- River of news updates to your network.
- Facebook Profile search in Google allows for anyone in the world to find your profile.
- Application market and connecting outside of your friend network
- Facebook Connect allows for your social ID to follow you around on the web. It still allows for this interaction to come back to your river of news, but it also tells the outside world that you have an online ID that can tell you more if you are interested in exploring.
Where does this go? A lot of Facebook’s announcements point towards allowing for developers to create applications that allow you more access to your Facebook status and other updates. This access allows for data to be opened up for developers to create different outwardly facing executions. Similar to anything Twitter apps are doing, with the potential of about 50X the scale and a richer content system to point back too.
Why is this important?
There are a few good business opportunities in Facebook opening up.
1) Real time search. With over 200 million users, Facebook has more info on the current status of the world than any other platform. This data could be used in real time to create an incredible “database of presence”.
2) Adsense-like profile/presence advertising across the web. Facebook talked about it as beacon. It didn’t work in it’s early form but the idea is a good one. The further FB can push sites to use their code to connect their networks, the more Facebook can learn about their users and the re-targeting is much more powerful than the standard AdSense network.
3) Pageviews, pageviews, pageviews. This is still the currency in online advertising. Facebook continues to grow their presence across their site and outside of their site.
4) Developers, Developers, Developers. The other currency in building successful platforms. The more open Facebook’s architecture is, the more developers will flock to their platform. Developers will have access to the two most important pleasures of their trade. Social Capital and real opportunity to make money.
References:
Facebook Developer Blog | Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, and Video
Ars Technica | Facebook’s “next steps in openness” raises questions
Consumerist | Facebook’s New Terms Of Service
ChasNote | How Important Are 3rd Party Apps?
What part of “We're FB. we own all your IP. oops. golly, we can't get away with that — yet” did you miss this week?
All the things you want to be open will certainly be open within a decade. FB won't be the platform. They are already vertically integrating as fast as they can. It's not going to stop.
I could have sworn you were just arguing that Facebook wasn't opening
up. And you didn't see the intersection of Twitter and FB's model.
#Phone
Swear all you like. You'll merely resemble the FB Platform developers who know how FB's openness works.
FB is an all-encompassing social network that is vertically integrating in order to shore up their revenue streams, which so far to have little or nothing to do with their developer community. Their dev community helped them build mass, was shown the door, and is now helping them build distribution (FB Connect). Once they have that distribution, we'll see how FB treats the dev community. I'm not hopeful.
Twitter is a rich messaging system with good APIs. They also vertically integrate a bit (e.g. Summize acq.), and cause their developers issues (XMPP policy changes). However, my guess is that Twitter's revenue will be based on their developer community, not merely using their developer community as a stepping stone.
Their models are only as similar as their dependence on their dev community for revenue.
“Their models are only as similar as their dependence on their dev community for revenue.”
Agreed. Andreessen interview is good. http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10093
I agree with you that Beacon has the potential to be a killer advertising app, a marketing quantum leap as important as paid search. The obstacle that's holding Facebook back, though — to Rafer's comment above — is Facebook's idiotic, careless approach to PR. Google stole Overture's model, distributed the AdSense platform to millions of web publishers with opaque, perhaps rapacious terms, and convinced everyone that Google's all about doing no evil. Facebook needs to step up their game in the C-suite.
But is it for sale? No. Or could be.
I think twitter would be fools to sell right now approaching the apex of enlightenment. It would be a terrible play for them.
I see twitter standing alone as its own internet titan, why sell to Google, but oh i’m sure Google has been on the front lawn along with Jerry Yang in a toga begging for piece of Twitter. All the while twitter just keeps refining their experience, staying true, and watching people.
I can yield a better pulse on what the planet thinks about a brand thru twitter than I can with search or blog or brand monitoring tools. Most of these tools leverage twitter as well to farm up the pulse. This is hugely valuable, and potentially one of many stakes in the ground as to what people will gravitate to next, and Twitter knows this.
Remember Batman Forever? Twitter is our generations Edward Nygma. (and i think that two face guy could be either facebook and myspace or maybe google i dunno)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnHO0LdJ4Ck
Its our brain on the box. Sell to Google, Yahoo.. are you mad?
Remember when the internet was cool?
these websites seek to rob us of our freedom, they want to chain you to a nice big label of yourself(your profile) and for you to pour valuble data into them untill you have no life that is not on screen. people need secrets, its what makes a person a person, those special things that few know, your edge, your charactior. pinning these to a corporate notice board will only end in tears as they are torn apart perpetually by fat men in suits looking to get even fatter, this is so stupid i want to go to each of 200million peoples houses who help feed these soul merchants and punch them square in the face! only i am not allowed to even say this now as it is instantly taken down as evidence against me and legally viable in court due to new legislation that states that ANYTHING you say/type can be used in evidence against you. welcome to the new world order people, i hope your happy living with the monsters you helped create. fuck sitting at home inputting my every thought into 'The Computer', my mom already knows i eat soup, my real friends already know where to find me, and i don't give a rats ass if some girl i haven't spoken to since high school is dying her hair pink tonight. do you remember when you first found the internet? when it was all about looking at forbidden knowledge and quite often images( and you soon find out its sick world with sick people), how it could do your 35thousend word dissertation you forgot to do in 5seconds? or when you left your mate computer on meat spin and locked it up, gaffing him to the chair and forcing him to watch until it told him he was defiantly gay now? where familys would talk and eat in the real world and not soley in 'iron forge' between raids? The internet like some many great things in this world started to give of that smell that makes marketing executives wanna hump it. and man shes never looks so much like a whore then she does now, forcefeeding you adverts and opinions and soulessly deviouring all your privet lives. time is not money, its worth so much more because you cant get time back once you spent it. its finiate, ask yourself how much time you spent on facebook today? and where has it atualy got you? yeah i thought as much. see you around, if you ever manage to get the plug out of your neck. GG
I think twitter would be fools to sell right now approaching the apex of enlightenment. It would be a terrible play for them.Thanks a lot.