Facebook starts the revolution with Facebook Platform
So Facebook just announced it’s Facebook Platform with a whole bunch of high profile companies already rolling out applications (Amazon, Microsoft, Washington Post, etc..). Basically, Facebook is opening up their website to third party applications supplementing their existing API which used to be only for external applications with the abillity to upload them directly into Facebooks website (documentation does not yet seem available on their developers site).
To me this is an incredibly insightful and powerful move by the company. It is, of course, not without it’s perils. I wonder what the vetting process, if any, will be to allow applications to be uploaded. It seems to me like they are targetting all developers large and small for this so there could be a large influx of applications that are potentially vectors of trojans, viruses and just bad development that could cause trouble for the user who uses the application if not the site itself. I’m sure they’ve figured out how to solve that problem, though, and hopefully they’ve solved it well because if this effort works it could really spell a sea change for the big community sites (I’m looking at you MySpace!).
All the community sites struggle to differentiate themselves from the next - alot of that comes with their functionality. Granted, a lot of it comes from their existing community which is itself probably the biggest draw, but that’s a chicken and egg sorta thing. With this Facebook’s functionlity is about to grow exponentially - there will be tons of new things to do on the site. I’m sure initially there will be a lot of confusion and overlapping of functionality as developers build applications that do very similar things - but I’m equally sure eventually certain apps (hopefully the best, ones but even if not) will rise to prominence and everyone will use the same apps.
I think it isn’t that there’ll be tons of possibilities on the site that attracts any users - most of the users who use facebook probably won’t delve too deeply into all the apps available. It will be a small set of power users who is really active in exploring them - but as some apps rise to the top and everyone’s using them they will seem no different than any other major facebook application and those will be the draws to the site. It seems that facebook has a News module that alerts people to what things their friends are doing on the site - adding new pictures, etc.. adding a new application will also filter into that News feed - this will aid the surfacing of these major apps. So, as more people use a particular app, more people will know about it and that’ll be that.
Anyway, if they can overcome the technical difficulties of keeping the quality of these apps high enough that people aren’t afraid to use them and they can handle any increased strain on the servers, I really believe this is a huge move that the other biggies are going to be scrambling to catch up to.
