Facebook to license platform
This is a great article on Facebook’s strategy:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140529-c,sites/article.html
Not sure what will happen with these guys in the coming months, but so far, so good. I’ve been a big fan of Facebook for about a year, and this move just makes me like them even more.
They have been in cahoots with Microsoft from a development perspective for a while. I think it was fairly organic how the relationship started, at least that’s what I heard. Turns out that for a while before the investment, thousands of Microsoft employees where using Facebook. Which makes sense because all of a sudden you can download Visual Studio Express (for free) and the Facebook Developer Toolkit and build a simple Facebook application pretty quickly. And by the way, the toolkit is hosted at Codeplex.com - Microsoft open source code/project website.
Google also has an equivalent, theirs is called OpenSocial. Bebo (UK’s largest social network, and the US’s third largest) says it will back OpenSocial and even launch its own Developer Platform.
So what does this mean? Well, it’s one of the reasons I left my last company, Omnifuse. They used to develop custom social networks. I’m not sure anymore that having your own social network requires that you have your very own custom-from-the-ground-up website. For lack of a better word, you need a “sandbox” where you can just drop in needed features and applications. Of course, it will be important for companies to own some of the intellectual property, but for the most part, a lot of the things we need and use in social network are already developed and available.
Another important consideration is the the fact that if you take advantage of things like Facebook’s application development tools, you’ll be able to tap into the network. This is 90% of the challenge. I’ve been involved in social network development of over 4 years, and it’s never the development of the social network that is difficult, it’s getting membership to grow.
So, good job Facebook and good luck Google. And for all you folks out there getting ready to build your own social network, make sure your strategy includes applications or widgets that will infiltrate and tickle the fancy of your member type who live in other social networks.
