facebook Kool-Aid ?
Once every year or two some new web business model or web technical innovation catches my eye and gives me a rush of manic adrenaline: Oh My GOD, The World Has Changed, This Is Huge, Massive Value Will Be Created/Destroyed, Don’t Ya’ll See What This Means? My wife chuckles and rolls her eyes (’here we go again, Wayt’). I guess that’s what it means to be a web business model geek. Sigh. Usually these Profound Insights of mine are off the mark; sometimes way off. Occasionally I’m right, and I kick myself later for not acting on the Profound Insight. [Note that a broken clock is nonetheless right twice a day.]
Last Thursday facebook announced its new Platform. Basically, the facebook Platform enables any app developer to overlay their app on the facebook social network, on what facebook’s 23-yr-old Adidas-sandals-wearing CEO calls the “social graph” of connections among its 20 million active members. Just pick any existing Internet application, and picture it through a ‘lens’ that is the people you know and trust. That ‘lens’ is the facebook social graph. What are your friends buying? reading? listening to? doing tonight? eating? working on? concerned about? Look at your web site bookmarks list, and picture those web sites through the ‘lens.’
While MySpace is (currently) much bigger, facebook’s clean design is much more usable. While MySpace views third party apps suspiciously, facebook’s strategy is to let a thousand independent app flowers bloom on its Platform, to give its members the Darwinian freedom to pick the winning apps, and to expand and enrich the ’social graph.’ And to make money from the ads.
For many people, facebook will soon BE the Internet, much like MySpace IS the Internet to lots of junior high kids. If this strikes you as crazy, ask any 20 year old.
As I’m writing this, hackers are furiously coding new apps-on-facebook in dorm rooms and apartments and coffee shops worldwide (I know of one in ATL), some of which will grow to become large businesses.
I wish I wasn’t such an old fart. I think this is a unique time in history. Thanks to cheap bandwidth/computing/storage power, open-source software, hyper-productive programming languages, and viral digital marketing, three coders with $50K can accomplish in three months the same thing that in 2002 required ten coders working a year with $500K. That’s the impetus behind the YCombinator-for-Atlanta talk. And the coders coming out now are part of the MySpace generation - they’ve come of age living a digitized social life. It’s intuitively obvious to them how to take advantage of the social graph. I’m jealous.
Prediction: In 18 months, facebook will be a public company with a $10B market cap.
Hope: In 18 months, five teams of under-30 ATL coders will have built app-on-facebook businesses that VCs plead to invest in.
Question: Is this opportunity so big that we could focus YCombinator-for-Atlanta on apps for the facebook Platform? Or am I just drinking the Kool-Aid?
wayt
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5 Responses to “facebook Kool-Aid ?”
Paul Freet
May 31st, 2007
Answer: The opportunity to focus on Web apps that utilize a widget distribution strategy to inexpensively gain wide market acceptance is big enough. Limiting it to facebook seems, well, a bit limiting.
And Paul is right. Gears is big news. The ability to run a web app locally when not connected to the network is huge. Not having access to resources when not online is a big deterrent to the adoption of many online apps. Gears removes that barrier.
Lance Weatherby
June 1st, 2007
My heads hurts reading all those big words, but I’m a believer!
Knox Massey
June 2nd, 2007
Wayt, you are correct about the value gained by deep integration with Facebook. I guess my concern is the same one I’d have about building on top of App Exchange. You become a part of someone else’s ecosystem. Terms of service can change at any time. That is a risky proposition for any startup. And a safer one at the exact same time. What a dilemma.
Paul Freet
June 4th, 2007
It is an exciting announcement. Facebook has clearly shown how they plan to delineate themselves from MySpace. Personally, I think a little caution is in order here. Facebook is not truly a platform. No more than AOL was in the 90s. But, what they may offer is a great distribution vehicle. I think the key question is how you monetize your MySpace/Facebook widgets. Our super secret plan is to build Netvibes/Pageflake/iGoogle/MySpace/Facebook widgets and use that to drive awareness of Big Contacts. Then make money off the upgraded business version.
If you want to see something that I really get excited about, look at Google Gears. This was just announced today.