If there ever were a post where the title said it all, this is the one.
For weeks, months, I have been working with my team at SocialMedia building applications inside of a clean well-lit, hermetically sealed social network called Facebook.
Here is what we now know about this platform:
- It’s has an “open” API that exposes its “closed” social graph.
- It shields each of its 30 million users behind a cloak of absolute privacy, where every social connection is required to opt-in.
- It maintains total control over the syntax and organization of every single one of its pages.
- It is starting to dominate the time spent online by its users, stealing click-share from every other web site and service.
- It holds captive the rich behavioral data of its audience.
Fred almost threw me out of his office a few weeks when I suggested that “closed was the new open.”
I had challenged him on his logic for investing in Twitter by asking “what is the role of Twitter when Facebook has commodified the status update?” and he replied that the entire USV portfolio was built on the premise of openness. As a co-founder of AttentionTrust and co-organizer of the Open Data conference, I am, of course, a strong advocate for users needing to own copies of their own data and for them to be able to easily move it around and see how it is being used by others.
That being said, I sense that users (including the 57,000 blogosphere alpha dogs) are increasingly tired of copying and pasting javascript code into their blogs and manually organizing their online identities. The beauty/horror of Facebook is how incredibly easy it is to add applications with a single click. Once again, convenience seems to be trumping data conservation.
Just as AOL consolidated its position in the early 90’s by offering a far more convenient, user-friendly interface to the online world (despite the reality that it was a proprietary walled garden written in rainman), so now is Facebook doing the same by offering a better interface to your online world.
The openness that Facebook enables is really simply the opportunity to build closed ecosystems on top of its social graph. This is the story, for example, of Slide’s Top Friends network, which in less than two months has established a proprietary social graph on top of Facebook’s own proprietary social graph.
More on this in the days to come.
In the meantime, check out our new blog.socialmedia.com for commentary about an important new meme, NFO: News Feed Optimization.
Often, restricting options can have an amazing positive effect on conversion. Witness the literature on “decision paralysis” (one reason I hate shopping in supermarkets) etc. and related phenomena. Similarly, enforcing structure especially when some of that structure is stuff that historically has been handled very poorly online (e.g. privacy, control over messaging/ input/output), can have a greatly positive impact on innovation. Sounds counterintuitive – but simplify, optimize and partially restrict is going to mean a lot for all those now seeking to tap into this new mechanism.
I am also eager to see the next phase – which will be creating the meta-platform platform-software that can adapt itself to run on facebook and the other platforms of scale that will be popping up and will start to establish themselves in the near future. Flexible, adaptable, and able to use each medium to its limits.
It’s all about the meta-meta… plugging into the datastreams and feeds and evolving along with them.
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yes. it is still closed. but, how much more open can they get without being stupid?
I don’t think you don’t realize it yet. but unless you are capturing some data from your fb apps that has long term value, all you are doing is feeding fb’s valuation with your time and money.
How will any system be completely open unless it’s open source and controlled by a non profit, co-op or a regulated monopoly? FB certainly isn’t going to become one of them. Aren’t all online companies capturing attention in order to sell the influence? If everything is completely open, how does a company have any competitive advantage? What’s the business model if all the data is freely accessible and all the people can instantly be reached at no cost?
What FB has done is lower the barrier to adopion to almost zero by lowering the barrier to spreading the word about an app. Now… all you need is a moderately viral game or application and you can launch it with success. You couldn’t do that with as much certainty before. I don’t know how much more open a system can get if access to attention is ‘open’?
On Valleywag, a ‘rate card’ was leaked about what it costs to create a sponsored section on Facebook. It wasn’t cheap. But, with FB apps, didn’t they just make it free? If Pepsi created a clever viral app on fb, wouldn’t they get all those impressions for free that they were paying $100s of k’s before?
Facebook just went as open as any for-profit media company will ever get. I think they either inadvertently jeopardized big pieces of their future business model OR they just invented the most cash-flow efficient business model r&d lab ever created. Either way, to create a valuable business out of FB, they’ll need to buy, duplicate or ban the viral apps that are successfully monetized. Otherwise, they’ll be like a google search engine that is obligated to run someone’s elses adwords ads.
I don’t think they’ll be as stupid as myspace to think they can ban apps. So, as soon as apps start to get monetized at any level, they’ll have to buy them. Only, they’ll have a pretty good chance of getting the price they want to get since they are the only potential buyer. Maybe this is what you’re counting on w/ SocialMedia and what Rafer is counting on w/ Lookery? Or maybe you actually think they’ll let you leach off of the attention they’ve created for you? If you don’t sell to them, I am sure they’ll be buying, funding, developing and PROMOTING applications that are similar to the ones that are successful. Either way, all of these fb developers are playing a fancy game of poker and FB has a stacked deck. They’re just wating for the right time to pull the aces from their sleeve.
No matter what the outcome, I am glad to see you doing stuff that is getting adoption.
clarifications.
1. I used a double negative. I didn’t not mean to not do that.
2. I didn’t mean to infer that your other things didn’t get adoption. (Although some didn’t. But, I am certainly not the one to judge that.) I am impressed with what you’ve pulled together at SocialMedia. The adoption the apps have created is impressive. That’s what I was saying.
3. I hope my comment was useful.
have a good one.
Open is a matter of perspective. Mine is that customer intimacy is everything. Relative to Google Apps, MSN Live, and every other apps platform, the Facebook platform is incredibly open and inviting to people that want to piggyback their user acquisition. It’s the most open social network available. It’s not the open Internet, but that will happen soon enough.
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Seems like we all want to discuss the openness of facebook as their source of goodness. Except for Rob who picked up on the “constraints are good” angle, which mimics Barry Schwartz’s very compelling presentation at PC Forum last year about his book “The Paradox of Choice. My point is simply, what if Facebook’s success is driven by their closedness. And that we are moving into a phase of consumer adoption where having fewer choices is preferred to having more.
Hmmmm. I disagree. By ‘opening’ their platform to developers and other companies, this is in no way ‘closing’ Facebook. AOL is closed. Facebook is open.
A couple of things:
I guess most users of Facebook don’t care whether it’s open or closed. They just use it.
It’s too early really to know whether users will stay users in the longer term. Whether it adds value will determine this.
What is a parallel for FB apps outside Facebook? Not really widgets, nor desktop apps. Web apps I guess, but you don’t generally ‘add’ these to anything, you sign up and either user or don’t use them. There’s no real analogy.
And, with Facebook apps – so they’re easy to add, but are they any use? I haven’t found any that have any ongoing depth. So, one click, add and forget?
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So, where shall we start? Friendster, Myspace, Facebook.. each seeming better than the last. And stuff. Yet for some reason, I can’t be convinced that FB isn’t just the next in a progression.
What makes this merrygoround stop here?
@wcw: imitation is not repetition; as you say each solution improves upon the last. the progression in search was AltaVista, Yahoo, Goto, Google. just because AltaVista wasn’t worth huge sums was no indication that Google would be too.
for the record, the progression in SNS was more like Ryze, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook. some of them will do well, others not. don’t be surprised if the SNS merry-go-round stops on Wall Street, after Facebook goes public.
@seth: nice piece. i’d agree — a gated community with a full banquet & lots to drink is preferable to a wide open barren desert. open is as open does.
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The idea of progression is right on the money. Facebook has successfully captured the younger female demographic looking for a way to communicate on a more intimate level and in a less chaotic (MySpace) and freewheeling environment. The “closedness” privacy that opt-in provides creates the comfortable “open” vibe that is essential to retain this coveted demographic.
However, the splintering of social networks has just begun. Soon there will be social networks targeting hobbies, nationalities, religions, political/sports/music/entertainment affiliations, etc.
The widgets will be built and customised by deep pocketed advertisers for each particular audience. For example, a social network for golfers will have popular video game widgets similar to Birdie King rather than food fight. Groups will focus on technical issues regarding club design, best courses, sharing ideas and tips, funny golf stories, content about legendary players, etc. The advertising money directed at each type of specialized network will help to facilitate this progression into more targeted niches and nurture their growth through the lure of targeted ad budgets.
Friendster, MySpace, Hi5 and Facebook are nothing without their inhabitants. No one really cares about the platform. It’s all about the communities that they are affiliated with and to what extent the community caters to their immediate interests. The ad money will follow.
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