The importance of Facebook explained for those who do not get it: Staying in contact with your Contacts
Sometimes it is taking a while to get an understanding of the importance of something that is as much in the hype as Facebook is currently in 2007. With its recent positioning as an application platform Facebook has in our view become a unique challenger to established players in the field of Personal Information Infrastructure like Microsoft and Google. We are going to explain this in a way that hopefully also those can get at least the concept behind it who had so far (maybe even after they done a quick inspection of Facebook and some other “social networks” themselves) a difficult time in understanding the significance of Facebooks contribution to application platforms in general.
Applications are the building blocks of everyone’s Personal Information Infrastructure. Every application is one block and provides users with a specific, bundled set of features. Sometimes applications (“integrated applications”) as we know them are sharing important pieces of personally maintained information like Contacts, sometimes they do not.
Facebook as a platform for applications enables
every
Facebook application that a user is running to access the Facebook Contacts of this user. More importantly: Whenever the user does something of significance inside any Facebook application the platform itself will inform automatically his Contacts about it; Example: Your friend Paul just uploaded a new photo to his album!
Your personal Facebook experience is depending on the number and level of activity of your Facebook Contacts. If there is no one on Facebook you know then the value of Facebook will be little or zero for you; but the more of your Contacts are using Facebook applications actively the more value in terms of
“getting to know about what they do”
you will get out of Facebook (classical case of the “Network Effect”: the more people using a network the higher is the value for the individual user). These messages that the platform is continuously distributing to the Contacts of a user are one of the core features of the application platform Facebook: With this basic mechanism Facebook is allowing that Facebook users by just using their Facebook applications are staying automatically in contact with their Facebook Contacts.
One standard argument against the overall value of Facebook is that staying in such an online and direct way in touch is something that is interesting only for “the younger generation”. That is maybe true or not. But there is another aspect. If you are for example a senior developer and you are not interested in staying in contact with your Contacts automatically then maybe you are interested in the potential business opportunity: Facebook is not only encouraging developers to create their own applications that will run inside Facebook (on top of the platform). The Facebook platform has also build in a simple but effective mechanism to promote the usage of your newly created application: All Contacts of any new user of your Facebook application will get (in exactly the same way as already described) a notification that these users just started to use your application. This form of directly “build in application promotion/marketing” for your application can deliver high numbers of users to any application so fast that probably most application providers will be challenged to handle the demand (please see for details this excellent article from Marc Andreessen ).
The changed view of Contacts:
From data inside one application to a platform embedded information
What could all this mean for the future of everyone’s Personal Information Infrastructure? If we are going to the extreme and try to understand the impact of this on enterprise/professional applications then asking ourselves the following question can point us into an interesting direction:
How much of your day to day activity in applications (project planning; preparing invitations for team meetings; checking competitor websites for project X; order entry; …) could be easily reported (in form of small messages about what you are doing) and shared directly with your colleagues or even customers and help you all to stay as a working group transparently together in touch and on target?
Closing comment:
This article is not about promoting the usage of Facebook:
- Most of the existing applications on Facebook are small and it would be probably not unfair to classify the majority of them today (August 2007) as widgets.
- We are also not speculating about the role Facebook will play in the future. On the basis of the view provided in this article it is possible to come to recommendations for Microsoft and Google of how to react on the basis of their current offerings to the Facebook challenge.
- If you read our article about an issue with privacy of Google Docs then you know our concerns about the current status of privacy on the Internet. We can only strongly recommend reading carefully Facebooks terms of use. Others have highlighted privacy and other concerns around Facebook (please see Donna Bogatin: “Why Faceboook is scarier then Google” ).
The main message of this article is:
Facebook is the first online
application platform
(see Footnote) that is build upon the clearly identified basic
human desire to stay in touch.
It is addressing this need from within its application platform core and it is encouraging developers to build their own applications on top of it. This is the essence of what we think is important “to get” about Facebook. Combine this with good timing and a successful rollout strategy and you have put together a good explanation for the success and hype around Facebook. We give kudos to Facebook for coming up with this innovative package.
Footnote:
Microsoft’s desktop platform Groove 2007 is sharing some of the feature characteristics of Facebook as outlined in this article. Aspects not in the focus of this article (target audience, technology approach, pricing, feature mix, positioning, etc.) are clearly differentiating the two and are probably responsible for why one is currently hyped and the other is not. Also in Microsoft’s now “frozen” WinFS initiative the platform management of “items” like Contacts was a key driver.
Interestingly enough Facebook acquired recently Parakey (please find this and other great news about Facebook on the “Inside Facebook” blog), a company that maybe will provide Facebook with technology to extend its platform further to the desktop.
Graphics by Jens Scharnetzki
Social Bookmarking
August 9th, 2007 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Good Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 10th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Very interesting post, thanks!
On a lighter tone, I recommend the very entertaining “Facebook Bankruptcy” at http://www.calacanis.com/2007/07/27/facebook-bankruptcy/ , an amusing view on the “social information overload” that makes FaceBook useless not only when you don’t know anyone, but also when you get too popular.
More seriously, “FB as an application platform” is a fascinating concept, but calling it the “next Google” (as many fans do) seems preposterous, IMHO.
The platform architecture in undeniably brilliant, but marketing and strategic positioning are crucial here: FB was done by and for students, and it still shows. Although, in theory, FB could become the platform of choice for any kind of social interaction (through 3d-party widgets), the social networks tend to gather like-minded individuals at one level or another. To become the de-facto standard, FB would need to be so community-neutral that it would probably become less attractive to the thriving communities that made it so popular in the first place… leaving the field open for the next, fresher, sexier, more community-focused, new FaceBook-killer. Notice how nobody talks about MySpace anymore?