DISQUS

Omar Ismail · 2 years ago

You hit the nail on the head with your last two concluding paragraphs. Facebook is a tool that facilitates person-to-person communication. That's it. Almost every kind of service or product can leverage person-to-person communication, but many of them don't and shouldn't rely on it exclusively. Smart startups will exploit the opportunity we have right now to get as much out of it as we can.

Jamie · 2 years ago

"15-20 million users"

Facebook now has upwards of 50 Million users actually, still, mostly all valid points you have made.

Heri · 2 years ago

i think of facebook as just a distribution platform for what you are doing on your main website, like widgets or RSS.

The best example by the way is iLike, who are able to offer a great facebook app because they already have the data from their main website.

Omar · 2 years ago

You know, this whole concept that Facebook is a fad that will eventually die, just like all other social networks is pretty short sighted. I mean, in the 90s you could've looked at Google and said, "oh, there's just another search engine, it'll die just like Excite and AltaVista."

But they'd be wrong. Because there was something different about Google. Something that had staying power. The excitement around Facebook is that people are seeing that same kind of staying power. Applications will only improve the Facebook website. Just like AdSense has become a standard, Facebook's platform is becoming the standard for social software. You'll have your website, you'll monetize off of AdSense (hopefully not if you want to make anything respectable) and you'll use FB as your User system.

Facebook is continuing to open up the platform and making it more useful for developers. I mean, just look at them opening up the mobile platform, that's huge! People expecting them to open up EVERYTHING at the beginning are being naive. This is new ground for everyone, and it's all about taking baby steps and learning as we go along. But eventually, and you can see the goal in sight, the platform will be open, and they'll be the standard. The writing is on the wall.

So if you decide to write off Facebook because you consider it another fad, then be aware of the risks involved. The tone in this blog post I think is a bit too marginalizing of FB's impact on the web.

Jevon MacDonald · 2 years ago

Omar: That's a Red Herring and you know it. I never mentioned Google once in my post. In fact, I do think that google is different from Facebook, and it's why I didn't bring them up.

I am not marginalizing Facebook, I am turning the light on the sustainability discussion and trying to offer some decent insight to anyone thinking of putting all their eggs in the Facebook basket. There are so many hyper-active discussions going on about FB that I think some would-be startups are wasting too much time trying to borrow customers from someone else.

Why not offer an argument to disprove my points Omar?

Israel L'Heureux · 2 years ago

Omar, the top Facebook "applications" are just the same slide and rockyou widgets that have been available on myspace for years. Oh, and a vampire.

Facebook is maligning the meaning of the words "platform" and "applications", and is just building hype.

Too many people are drinking the kool aid, so thanks to Jevon for articulating some clear points.

Don't forget that facebook themselves aren't even making money. All the users in the world, and they're just at break even. That ain't no adsense or Google, baby: http://assetbar.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/secret...

Omar Ismail · 2 years ago

"You cannot build a business on someone else’s platform when they don’t see you as a partner" - the reasons why they don't let you call yourself a partner is because they don't want to officially endorse any 2-bit application. Think of Windows. OSX. Even Linux. All of those have applications developed for them, even though many of the same risks you outlined, and the whole "no partner" thing exist there as well. The fact of the matter is that yes, there are risks with developing for a platform, but there are huge benefits as well. People have seen huge success when developing for other platforms, and there's the potential for huge success for developing for Facebook.

"If they don't innovate you die" - true. But that's the genius of the apps. THEY don't have to innovate. They let YOU innovate for them, and as you said later on in your post, the better your apps are, the happier their users are. Well their users ARE your users. So if applications are coming at a pace that lets FB stay ahead of the game, then they'll always be ahead of the game. It's a win-win situation for devs, and for FB.

"Can't take customers with you" - StyleFeeder's app is one of the most popular on FB and it REQUIRES that you sign up for their site. They are getting 10s of thousands of users a day purely through FB. And these are real users with full contact info, etc. Smart companies will be able to leverage FB success into real success of their full business.

As for your comment Jevon, I don't know who said "put all your eggs in one basket". Actually, that's precisely what I'm trying to say! Facebook is another very exciting basket, and people should try as many baskets as possible. In terms of ROI, FB is one of the best places to experiment and open up an ADDITIONAL growth path.

Now maybe this is all coming back to Village Toolbox which I claimed should be a set of FB apps. The real answer is far more involved and complex than "just facebook". But essentially the best START to a Village Toolbox-like application is through FB. And then expanding to other social networks, and then creating a central site that connects everything. THAT would by my overall strategy.

Thusenth · 1 year ago

This is a really interesting post on a topic with lots of uncertainty surrounding it. Facebook has tons of applications on it now. It's becoming clearer that many have built up a defense against installing new applications due to the loads of requests they get on a daily basis for shit application installs. Facebook should carefully take a look at the developers on it and start cutting out most.

Facebook is not the new Windows, OSX, etc. Those platforms took off because of their complexity in a time where making an OS was difficult, and it still is. To say that Facebook is the equivalent is not right, as the complexity behind the application isn't there - hence the whole NASN issue people bring up.

My personal opinion on the Facebook Platform is that it is a great extension to any freestanding Web site where sharing information is at the core business. The platform is not advanced enough yet to create the same experience within Facebook itself.

Nick Bouton · 1 year ago

I completely agree with Jevon here.. I've written about this in the past as well ( http://www.nickbouton.com/archives/2008/01/28/f... ) and this tact is exactly what I'm trying to accomplish by building a Facebook application for Protagonize ( http://blog.protagonize.com/2008/03/10/protagon... ).

I can see the immediate appeal of building a FB application to cash in on the huge user base and limited attention span-driven application hopping, but it's not a long-term solution and you're much better off trying to leverage Facebook's reach and dedicated user base for building your own site or product.

As Jevon said, take a feature from your site and extend it into Facebook. You gain the same reach, but you don't have the same dependencies; that way, you lose nothing if Facebook makes wide/sweeping changes to their TOS or goes under at some point.