Facebook the new Portal
When Facebook released F8 it really was fate for it to release the Platform. The current problem right now with the Web 2.0 sphere is there are many small social networks that fill specific nitches, e.g. Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, last.fm for music, etc. The problem here is people are not willing to grow those nitches since they are so many of them and this leads us to Facebooks first important release, News Feeds.
News Feeds, although it felt stalkerish when it was first released it is something that lets people know what their friends are up to much easily. It is such an important aspect of Facebook now that it was a natural progression towards F8, the Facebook Platform.
F8 basically lets other vendors build application to be used inside of facebook which lets the vendor tap into the growing number of facebook users. The benefits of this are twofold first application vendors can focus more on building the application and less on building community and secondly it gives them access to millions of users.
So Facebook Platform is destined to become the next Yahoo as things start getting built on it. This is especially great for the vendors since Facebook basically said you can monitize in anyway you like i.e. put ads on your applications. However, the benefit is only there if they can keep the platform stable especially if there are a bunch of rogue applications about.
I don’t know if it’s destined to become the next Yahoo. Certainly, it provides an opportunity to capitalize upon the Facebook community and allows startups to get instant exposure, but I think it’s also prone to clutter. If there’s anything to be learned from Yahoo, it’s that people tend to be driven towards simple interfaces and websites that do one thing and do it well (a la a Google in the beginning).
One of the greatest features of Facebook so far is the lack of clutter and overall consistency. All of this will be lost as people begin extending and tweaking their profiles. Combined with Facebook’s lackluster security and privacy record, you have a lot of potential for problems.
Stephen Le
May 28, 2007 at 7:17 am
Well that is true, but the choice is up to the user if they want to clutter up their profile. The applications are usually for your personal information so it’d be reasonable to believe some apps will be used much more then others. But I can see you argument.
Abhi
May 28, 2007 at 5:55 pm