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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Krish, the salesforce analogy was not in context of their SaaS model, but with the AppX platform,
Interesting article and questions.
I agree that one implication will be narrowing the appeal of specialized social network; and my sense is that the ramifications will be even more far-reaching. ‘Traditional’ consumer Internet businesses such as ‘dating’ (match.com) and reunion communication (classmates.com) may be at potential risk. The context for such interactions is richer within the Facebook environment than n a stand-alone site, since (1) users are already spending their free time on Facebook and this avoids having to bookmark and regularly visit another site, and (2) they have established trust networks in place which would foster such interactions. Certainly, clever new Facebook apps will break ground on what the consumer Internet can offer. But they also may threaten to disintermediate conventional Internet apps, or at least re-intermediate (i hope that’s a word 😉 them in favor of an approach that blends the solution into the social networking environment. Some thoughts.
Great blog!
-Bob
Web Widgets typically allow the applications be placed in a center stage of browser centric world
Alok,
For Indian SN – it would mean a lot of them will be able to cross-sell users from one App to another as also to some other transaction portals as well (+/- revenue share). They can as well leverage the FB users in their existing App to another one that they may be working on (inside or outside the FB platform) since all it takes is a seamless plug-in (hopefully). I see this leaving the door open for significant revenue sharing opportunities.
On culture content – Would developing a FB app with indigenous content not alienate the non-Indian component of the 30 m strong community? Why not let the App retain a neutral flavor at least till there’s a sizeable chunk of Indians biting in?
Adding to FB community than recreation – Makes sense. But, it could trigger an exodus, since there’s going to be obvious comparisons across other Apps in the platform. Reverse flow would call for top notch content.
Monetization route – Well, it’s too early to infer. Some questions linger –
a) What if other players like MySpace, Linkedin all get nimble and release API? The feature richness, presence detection, value creation, network exchange, gaming capabilities and a rich immersive environment with IP protection will be the touchstone.
b) There’s also the future risk – An App finding its way into FB is clear now- what about its way out without compromising IP?
c) One is not sure to what extent FB will allow its API and users to be used by others (Yahoo didn’t share all users of its Apps) and on what terms if it finds the developers benefit more than FB itself? Sure Zuckerberg will have some ace up his sleeves while he opened it up and it’s naïve to think he has declined all those billion $ buyout offers for nothing 🙂
I doubt whether Salesforce would be the right analogy here. That was path breaking. By introducing on-demand SaaS, Marc Benioff brilliantly exposed rip-off models of enterprise on-premise vendors/consultants – cutting IBM, SAP, Oracle and MS to size in the process. Facebook has, at best enabled an App democracy.
I think by just creating a facebook app, you are locking yourself down. FB might have millions of members, but there are tons of others outside FB.
However, I think It is a good PR exercise to release your product for FB only to being with. Once you have gained enough attention from the media, open your doors to the rest of the world.
I think more than thinking about the architecture, the future companies should think about sharing the content and openness. Indiatimes wants people using their RSS feeds for non-commercial purpose to pay Indiatimes. If they allow developers to use their RSS feeds for commercial purpose (with a clause to point the link back to indiatimes), they will get a lot of traffic from blogs and other sites.
On a separate note, it will be fun to see LinkedIn opening their doors to developers and other companies next year.