Great article on the impact of the open facebook platform. The ability for developers to plugin features into facebook and service the 30 million community already using facebook marks the demise of “one up feature social networks”.
What does this mean for Indian social networks? Facebook is already ranked 22 in India by Alexa, and ahead of any Indian social network. Does it make sense to add Indian content, widgets and communities to facebook now, instead of trying to re-create the community – a BollyBook, if you will? What is a good monetization route in that scenario?
What does this mean for the architecture of the future web? Salesforce already has this architecture on the enterprise side. We have been seeing more and more widget companies of late – for example, providing recommendation engines across thousands of websites as a centralized service, and leveraging on network effects across sites. Is this a movement towards the “widget web”?
Comments?
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Nitin,
I was not disputing the fact that FB has excellent viral cred or that the platform is revolutionary, was addressing Alok’s point whether it made sense to create a Bollybook and reinvent the wheel and the community or just pile on to F8.
My contention still is that the F8 benefits FB much more than it benefits the application developers and in all the cases, the users are on FB, while they may not necessarily be registered with the application by itself. For instance, I have an ilike application on my profile (which is by far the most successful application on FB), but I don’t really have a profile on ilike.com.
My associations via ilike are worth nothing outside FB’s platform and that, especially without a formal negotiated contract with FB, is not a place where I’d like to keep my company locked in if I am playing in the long run.
If you just want a viral platform, it is excellent, you can knock yourself out. But if you are building an actual company, F8 is not the place where you want to be.