Facebook Going Platform
from the betting-big dept
It's no secret that Facebook has big ambitions and has supposedly turned down huge buyout offers. However, at the same time, there's been a lot of talk about how, despite tons of page views, advertisers weren't entirely thrilled with the returns they got from advertising in Facebook. Still, the site is unquestionably popular, and in many ways more palatable than MySpace, which has built up a tremendously negative reputation in the eyes of many. Over the past year, Facebook has also been aggressive in rolling out a variety of new features to make it start looking like much more than "yet another social network," and the latest is that the company is going to start positioning itself much more as a platform for others to build on. It's already made some effort to allow others to build on its platform via APIs, but this sounds like they're going even further in that direction. There's certainly no guarantee that this will actually catch on, but we've long believed that the strategy to really "own" the next generation of internet users has to be based on being the platform on which apps are built. This is something Google should have done three years ago, but they continue to fall down on the job and certainly have opened up a huge opportunity for others to do it instead. Seeing Facebook as the latest such entrant isn't necessarily a huge surprise, but it again shows that Google's inability to focus on the platform side of things has opened the door for many others.
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More obnoxious ads you mean?
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the key to social networking sites
i feel like myspace and facebook built around that as their business model.
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yeah..
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Google
Social networking sites will have thier rise and fall like everyone of them before it. Xanga, Myspace, MSN Spaces, they all went to the waysiade eventually. So will Facebook.
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Social networking sites will have thier rise and fall like everyone of them before it. Xanga, Myspace, MSN Spaces, they all went to the waysiade eventually. So will Facebook."
WOW! Misguided AND uninformed.
It has to do with Google since the author was stating google should have offered their product as a platform to build upon like facebook is going to try to do. And I don't think Myspace has gone by the wayside, while Xanga and MSN Spaces were never mainstream.
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Doesn't surprise me....
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The Real Reason FB is King
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Privacy settings
These weren't announced with any great fanfare, and they are not very obvious from the privacy settings unless you know you need to look for them. What's more, a lot of the options are enabled by default.
Not a brilliant start if they are trying to capitalize on a greater perceived trustworthiness than myspace...
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API Worthless
If they want to be taken serriously as a platform, they need to decide it's what they want to do, not offer fragments of code to small "tools"
Though, the "Export Friend's Birthdays to iCal" tool is pretty spiffy. I do like having everyone's birthdays in my WM5 phone.
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