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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shyam ,
I think the value of FB is not just the API, but the friends data, the news stories that you can publish and other social features. FB becomes a platform where a good product automatically becomes viral. To me, FB is definitely revolutionary. its not just FB but is a platform for writing applications having access to ur social data – the data and api may be used by one for the core application or for marketing …
#1) Facebook is an amazing platform. I think thats the way to go for any pure play social network. Orkut seriously needs to learn a thing or two from there.
#2) At the same time, I think facebook still lacks the breadth amongst indians. Orkut with 6+ millions desi users leads the pack. Facebook still doesnt have the desi masses. To compare – a newcomer bharatstudent is india #32. Not too far from facebook.. Another one – orkut gets 14% of it traffic from india, for facebook its 1%. Desis are too sliced out in facebook.
#3) Also if the number of interested users (in a theme) is below a threshold, then that theme would never pick up – socnet wouldnt kick in. Indians are not much and are not densely connected in facebook, India specific application possibly wouldnt kick in.
Don’t mistake an API for interop, both mean different things and a lot of applications are struggling to keep the show running in terms of cost they are taking on. There is a possibility of advertising, but not a lot and the problem is that you’ll always be locked in with FB for your users. Currently, there is a lot of hype, but how it plays out in the long run remains to be seen.
Key drivers for Indian social networks are quite fuzzy. The whole Orkut scene is driven by school friends (batchmates.com reborn?) and sleaze, Facebook is driven by the slightly more serious crowd. To have a credible enough business that is viable in the long run, you need to have a model that is much more than what the Facebook API allows you to. But in an increasingly crowded space, switching and acquisition costs are going to be increasingly prohibitive (any idea how much zapak’s commercials are costing them?).
The widget web is incomplete without interop and the rules for that are still being set (Yahoo! and MSN Live messengers can talk to each other, but you need to add each user by hand to make it work) and the current situation is quite messed up, it will be a while before the dust settles on this one. Till then, it is the short-term players and the ones with strong stomachs (and deep pockets), who’ll bet on it.
I believe opening up of facebook can be a very beneficial to start-ups in general. Start-ups with promising ideas but lack of funding can ride on the platform to garner critical mass of users.
Also, if bigger web companies also develop applications (which I doubt for sometime to come) then a we might have a chance to see all our relevant online interests (& online behavior) mapped on to the facebook, which will be a delight for the users & businesses as well.
> What does this mean for the architecture of the future web?
For one, we’ll be relieved of the new friend requests from bikut, hispace & connectIn kind of social networks popping up every day that provide “one extra photo upload” or “two more homepage templates” kind of minor enhancements over existing networks. My point is that these “enterprising” ideas could be implemented on facebook or linkedIn (they are following suit).