Facebook is an exoskeleton
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.
That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.
But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.
I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.
I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.
The future of social networking is that everyone has:
- a blog (profile + notes)
- FriendFeed (news feed)
- Twitter (status)
- flickR (photos)
- del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
- etc., etc.
The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.
What’s the difference?
Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.
It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.
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Great post Jason and I completely agree. In many presentations to employees (and esp. faculty/staff at colleges) I often use the analogy that these social networks are one-stop-shops for users to employ a variety of social communication functions. In the relatively early days of Facebook and MySpace, FB was applauded for the tardy but smart incorporation of new features (photos, photo tagging, feeds…etc) while MySpace was notorious for shoelace-and-bubblegumming add-ons that frequently broke.
We seem to be going through a second phase of that as existing concepts get upgraded and adopted such as Twitter and flickR, like you point out. It will be interesting to see how adoption breeds innovation by the major social networks.
Good example for me was ROFLcon at Harvard/MIT this past weekend. I Twittered the whole thing, feeding into my Facebook for my non-Twitter friends. My videos I posted to both YouTube and Facebook, the tags in the former informing those using tag aggregators to watch for content. And I eventually posted the same photos I used in FB to FlickR (despite that I really hadn’t been much of a regular FlickR user.
All of this was in addition to the conference-only backchannel app that had been created by an MIT students so audiences could interact with panelists (and help defuse Lacy/Zuckerberg like revolt).
Suddenly, I was the network. Me, Dean, the social network using a few other hubs to communicate with large, only seldom-overlapping audiences.
It’ll be interesting to watch.
d
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