The blogosphere is all atwitter about Facebook and it’s new platform three weeks after launch. Even TechCrunch has been part of the Facebook parade.
It’s easy to understand all the positive press on the platform. Seemingly objective startups suddenly found an easy way to gain traction glommed on to the platform and found a vested interest in promoting Facebook as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just read CNet. It’s also an easy story to write. It involves big ideas, big companies, and big numbers, which lead to big readership for anyone who writes about it (e.g iLike). Before you knew it every geek’s opining on the subtleties of their solution, including me. However, I think media coverage is forsaking the reality of the platform for the technical achievement.
Facebook F8 is billed as a platform for social applications, but I don’t think they’ve quite gotten it right yet.
Is F8 a runtime for social applications?
F8 lets you run applications within Facebook, rather than on top of it. They have several APIs for getting at their data, but don’t actually let you really remix the site itself. Consequently Facebook is missing a lot of opportunities to create real applications, such as whole new niche networks within Facebook. Imagine being able to remix your profile view to carry out your life on the dog-lover network, or click another button and manage your life as part of the technology network.
This will stop Facebook from being an even better social utility.
How viral are applications?
F8 applications have been experiencing some serious growth, like 300K per day kind of growth. But part of me wonders if the growth of these applications is just water finding its level. There was a large pool of users itching for the functionality they’ve become accustomed to everywhere else. Facebook just took away the damn and let the flood flow in.
Facebook is the Firefox of social networks, with many of the same people who read TechCrunch and gush over gadgets choosing it over the mess that is MySpace. Digg has around 2 million users, StumbleUpon had around that many. This tech crowd and particularly iLike’s existing user base provided a good start for the early spurt.
My second concern for how viral an application can grow is simply the layout of Facebook’s profiles. How many applications is it reasonable for someone to run? I don’t want my page to become filled with widget boxes. The alternative is to just run a them in bunch of canvas pages. This is also unappealing because startups want to be on your profile for promotional purposes, and running on the canvas page adds another level between me and running the application. I’m probably better off going directly to a url.
Is the system really open?
There’s an inherent tension between companies when they integrate. Is my partner dependable? Are they ripping me off? The same rings true for Facebook, it’s just less so because the primary partners are either too big to care to too small to complain. Startups want users and Facebook has them.
Facebook has built in the option to charge. I can only assume that they intend to use it after the Facebook marketplace for applications stabilizes. Startups will start their companies at Facebook, but they don’t want to live there. Startups will have to straddle to value they get from Facebook with their ability to survive on their own. This will cause startups to add value to Facebook, but avoid really tight integration with the site that would prove revolutionary. Think of the niche network dataviews I was talking about before.
Apps will predominantly be focused around promoting the startup’s product, providing just a taste.
Still, I wonder if Facebook will tolerate a YouTube type success growing off its back.
