See What’s Out There

The Facebook news is big. First a little background. Facebook is the second big social networking site behind MySpace. Facebook used to be only open to college students but, realizing they couldn’t play with the big boys, opened to the public about a year ago. They are growing like crazy. Try 100,000 new subscriber A DAY! And they aren’t all kids. Facebook is still independent — they haven’t been bought by any big company yet. And their pages aren’t nearly as ugly as MySpace pages.

These sites are places where I can make my page, connect with friends, ect. You know all about that. But then you also have widgets. Widgets are big. Widgets are little applications that live on some other page on the web, where the info in the widget comes from some server somewhere else. Technically, an ad server is a widget - displaying a banner coming from DoubleClick, for example. Embedding a YouTube video is a widget, as are fundraising widgets, Flickr photostream, Photobucket, Slide and many others. Widgets make the web mashable - meaning you create your own web with pieces of this and pieces of that. My Google home page has a weather widget, clock widget and of course RSS feed widget. All the data in these widgets come from different places and are assembled for my convenience.

So widget makers have put things like video and photos on MySpace for a while. But what if I want to put an ad in my video? MySpace don’t play that! The VOICE from on high says… “You are a guest here at MySpace with your fancy shmancy widget and please do not even think for a minute that you can monetize my eyeballs! I am Murdoch the Great and I own these users and you cannot have them! We are the only one allowed to run ads. So show your photos or embed your do-dad, but watch out, or we will cut you off at your knees.”

Now comes Facebook. They say… We want to be THE PLATFORM. So we aren’t going to worry so much about whether you make money off our people, in fact, the opposite. If you can make money you will spend a lot of time and effort developing really cool applications that can integrate into Facebook, which will keep people on our pages longer, which will attract more users and so on. So Facebook said go and develop. And they opened up their own development tools to the developers. Go and develop not a simple embeddable widget, but go and development in a native environment that makes use of all the tools we have, the connections between people, for example.

So, Amazon says, OK, we will create an application that allows people to publish book reviews right on their own Facebook profiles, fully integrated into Facebook, but also back into Amazon. Forbes, Twitter, Washington Post… are among the 70 companies that developed applications in time for the announcement. And my assumption is that people haven’t even begun to think about how they can use this. I can imagine almost any application that’s online going native with Facebook.

For us nonprofit types, we have heard that Change.org is going to be developing for the platform as did Project Agape, the temporary name for “a new startup that is applying viral principles to altruism and social causes.”

This feels big. It feels like a moment when we might be seeing the development of another Google, another company that is able to grow very big very fast and stay independent. Just to make you feel a little sick, the CEO of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg and he is 23 years old.

See the New York Times coverage here.
See TechCrunch coverage here.
See Read/Write Web coverage here.
See Fox — owner of MySpace — nasty coverage here.
See Marshall Kirkpatrick’s nice overview of this on the SplashCast blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Nonprofits, fundraising, myspace, google, facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.