Facebook: The King of 2007

The incredible popularity of facebook’s dev platform from it’s launch in May of 2007 – shown by both from the huge number of 3rd party app developers as the incredible amount of users – provides firm evidence there is a huge market for social applications.  Users want to engage with other users both friends and the like minded public and platforms and applications that offer that functionality will be very successful.

Despite a platform that was generating 25 billion page views a month with a user base of 25+ million a month, Facebook decided to pull back.  Facebook decided it didn’t want to be a personal billboard service where a user could express themselves with badges from any number of apps.  Facebook is now a controlled sandbox where only certain things are allowed.  Facebook wants to be a personal automated rolodex with built in messaging & annoucements (aka news feed).  There’s nothing wrong with facebook’s chosen direction (except for the fact they pulled the rug out from thousands of app developers but that’s a different story).  Even just as a super, automated personal CRM, facebook is is a hugely valuable business.

In the wake of Facebook’s changes, the opportunity for a truly open, flexible, non-walled garden social platform presents itself.  Myspace as the social expression platform makes sense except Myspace seems to have evolved into the Fan Club platform – again a valuable market but it is what it is. But what has happened is that given

Twitter: The King of 2009

If there is an open source social platform – it’s Twitter. There are a minimum set of rules other then the 140 character messaging limitation. There are no limits on who and how often you message folks who follow you.  All the apps built on Twitter are by default open – as all tweeted items are in the public Twitter domain.  Thus all commands, messages, actions, reactions cause Twitter to look and feel like a public command line.  Twitter is not about private back channel api’s.  For instance, Stocktwits might have popularized the $stock symbol short hand, but it doesn’t own it.  Any other app can take advantage of the $ short hand even co-opting Stocktwits audience.  Tipjoy is popularizing the command “p” for micropayments and so on.  And what’s great about the open command line model – Twitter isn’t dictating functions from inside the kremlin it’s letting its users and developers do it for them.

Twitter is now a powerful platform for social apps and the folks who figure out how to build popular apps and communities on top of it will do very well for themselves.  Facebook might have the social graph, Myspace the fan clubs, but Twitter will have the truly social apps.

My point isn’t necessarily to rain on the FB app parade as I think it’s got a ton of opportunity and have plenty of ideas for apps myself.   What’s interesting is that just last week I had a very similar conversation with a VC friend of mine.  My VC friend is awfully concerned about FB eating its young.  His counsel on investment ideas around FB apps is – be very careful.  He just can’t believe that FB will allow ISV’s to make unlimited amounts of money without FB getting a big cut.  And if FB gets a big cut, then my VC friend is concerned as to whether there’s enough money on the table for the app developer to make it big financially.

And if not, then FB will just eats its young and make the money themselves since there is nothing to stop them.  Just a reminder that as much as Scoble and Dave McClure are smoking the FB crack-pipe (and to an extent rightfully so), all of us looking at FB as the new startup business playground need to think about the risks that the current environment might contain. 

OK you may now return to your favorite FB hype-fest.

My buddy Dave McClure does a great writeup around initial thinking about facebook application marketing (check it out – it’s the feed, stupid!).  I’ve been playing around with Facebook like Dave these past few weeks and trying to ramp my ultra n00b status up and think Dave’s hit a lot of key points.  One thing is that the Feed has some limitations that I’ve found recently that limit some of it’s godsend ability for app marketing within Facebook.  I’ll be posting more details soon.  Also one thing I noticed is that how early stage and unpolished most of the apps – it’s early for sure.  And that’s not a bad thing.

And now another pal – Scott Rafer is up to no good again   with Lookery according to GigaOm an ad network for facebook apps – assuming it can be expanded to all widgets – all I have to say is why didn’t I think of it first.  Great idea.