Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 26 May 2007 20:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Facebook gets an upgrade into the open ‘Facebook Platform’, allowing
any developer to build applications with ‘deep integration into
Facebook’, as the company fights to compete against the 800-pound
gorilla that is News Corp’s MySpace.
In sharp contrast to MySpace’s increasingly closed system, annoying users wanting to share photos from sites like Photobucket by blocking them from working with MySpace, and also stopping third party companies from making money out of MySpace users, Facebook has done an about face on MySpace and is doing the opposite.
Facebook have announced the Facebook Platform at “Facebook f8” event in San Fracisco, held May 24th, which Facebook says is “named to reflect the developer hackathon that ends 8 hours after the address during which new applications will be created for Facebook”, and there launching the event was founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the man who turned down Yahoo’s offer last year to buy Facebook for US $1 Billion dollars.
Better still, Facebook is launching with 65 partners, with names such as Microsoft, Amazon, and many more, offering 85 different applications including video -
see here for Mashable.com’s ’10 Awesome Things Built on the FaceBook API’ for more. But they’re not stopping there, and are opening the floodgates to anyone who wants to develop applications for the Facebook platform.
Zuckerberg said at the keynote before 750 developers and partners that: “Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we’re going to end that. With this evolution of
Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook.”
Zuckerberg’s strategy for rejected the billion dollar bid is starting to become clearer with the introduction of the Facebook Platform, as it’s the opposite of the MySpace strategy.
Facebook allows partners to keep the revenue they earn from Facebook users, and even though they are providing the transactional system, Facebook say they are taking no ‘cut’ or levying any fees. This is to encourage the eco-system to continue growing, and although they are promising not to introduce any fees for the service, it remains to be seen what will actually happen in the future.
Although MySpace is the social networking market leader, with around 80% of overall traffic to social networking sites according to Hitwise, Facebook has been growing too, and while not as fast as MySpace, Facebook can boast some interesting stats.
Not only have they passed eBay in traffic, and jokingly say that ‘Google’s next’, Facebook say they’ve added 100,000 members since January, and now have 24 million active users, signaling strong growth since they opened their site to all-comers instead of being focused solely on college students.
Even better, Facebook say that over 50% of their users visit Facebook every day, and claim that their biggest rival can only claim a 15% return daily, and if true, is a powerful statistic.
So, what else is in the Facebook platform, how will developers access it and do users really care about any of this social networking stuff anyway? Read onto page 2 for the conclusion...
