See What’s Out There

The big news in social networking and tech is the new open platform of Facebook. Facebook is a hot social networking site and the open platform means that I can build an application and have members of Facebook spread this to all of their online friends. Project Agape, a company that built the first causes application for Facebook, has surpassed 1 million users to their application and raised over $100,000 — in about 1 month. Their application is called Causes, and when you sign up you can pick from many causes, such as Save Darfur or One.org. An icon of the cause shows up on your profile page and your friends get notified about it and anyone on your page can then click to donate or learn more.

There are problems with this Facebook thing, the biggest of which is that the application you build has to run on your own servers, which means only those with the resources to serve data to millions need apply. (If you are interested in these issues read Marc Andreessen.) But I digress.

This is only the beginning and I will write more about where this is going and all of the other players working on bringing nonprofit causes to Facebook.

Most commentators say Facebook’s move to open up is a game changer. MySpace, the biggest of the social networks, has allowed widgets for a long time. Widgets are embedded mini-applications, such as a video player or slide show of my photos from Flickr. But a widget doesn’t harness the native functions of the network in the way Facebook’s platform does. And MySpace has limited what you can put in a widget, not allowing you to have advertising for example. Facebook has not such restriction — meaning they are allowing the companies that will develop application to monetize those application — which will obviously attract more developers.

So today I heard that MySpace is working on opening up as well. The business idea here is that a platform is more valuable than an application. People will use an application. But if many people build many interesting applications on your platform, they make the platform indispensable. It’s kind of like Windows (used to be?) — the platform (Windows) supported and made necessary by all of the applications (Word and Excel and games, etc.) built on top of it.

The open platform idea is not limited to the social networking folks. A pioneer of this has been Salesforce.com. Salesforce is an online application to manage your contacts and sales information. They realized a while ago that they had a very strong database application and invested a lot in infrastructure. So they allow others to use this base and build on top. So, for example, companies have built applications for the tracking of donations on top of Salesforce.com. There is even an application to track blood donations. The buyer of any third-party application must also subscribe to Salesforce.com. For the company producing the application, they don’t have to worry about anything other than the presentation layer, they can hook into Salesforce for the rest.

Amazon has gotten into the act as well. Of course they have big servers and know how to manage data. So they said, in addition to selling books and music and everything else, why not let people use our infrastructure. For example, want to put your products in our warehouse and utilize our mailing and software to pick and ship? Why not? Among other things, they launched a service called S3, which means Simple Storage Service. They are saying… you build a web-based application and you need to store something — data, photos, video, whatever. And you can keep adding servers and paying lots of money, but we already have this, so why not use our servers and pay-as-you-go a small fee per gig.

There is word that Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB), the largest company in the fundraising software space, is moving toward opening up their systems. And I saw something about Kintera (Nasdaq: KNTA), a company that is bleeding cash, thinking of opening up as a way to attract developers who will make the product more useful. I just read that LinkedIn, the business networking site is working to open up as well. I think we should expect this trend to continue.

It seems opening up and that open API is indeed the new black.

There is a lot of talk in the nonprofit world about a social networking strategy. More recently the talk is about a Facebook strategy. I stumbled upon an essay about the emerging class divisions between users of Facebook and MySpace. On the surface it seems Facebook would certainly be a better place for nonprofits looking to find future donor prospects.
Here’s a relevant quote:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Here’s a link to the lively discussion about this essay on Slashdot.

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.

Continuing to jump on the political bandwagon, MySpace recently announced a series of in-person events that it will host on college campuses with presidential aspirants. This report from CNET also says MySpace is working with Mark Burnett (Survivor) on something called Independent “a new program that uses television and the web to discover budding political minds.”

Like MySpace, YouTube knows that there are a lot of people motivated by their political views. And like MySpace, YouTubers have been doing their own political videos, interviews, vlogs, mashups, etc. And like MySpace, YouTube is seeking to formalize this interest into a channel, to ride the political wave until November 2008 and make their sites a destination for the politically active.

Last week, YouTube launched Citizen Tube - YouTube’s political vlog. They are pointing out videos on YouTube that have interesting political messages, doing interviews with candidates and the like. Funny thing, the video that is on this page today is the AVAAZ video that won the NTEN - See3 Video Contest.

Here’s YouTube’s explanation of why they launched Citizen Tube:

In a meeting with a major nonprofit this week, I was asked about the tension and issues related to Web 2.0 and losing control of content. It’s the magic question. How do we take advantage of user-generated content and user-controlled forums such as MySpace and YouTube without totally losing control of our brand? The answer is, very very carefully.

Even the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which has put big resources into these issues couldn’t escape serious problems. Their case is special, however. There are laws about having people doing things on behalf of the campaign — either they are “on-the-books” and you as the campaign have to account for everything they say and do, or they are totally “off-the-books” and you can’t even talk to them without fear of breaking federal election laws.

The Obama MySpace page was originally created by a volunteer, and originally didn’t say “official site”. It then grew and grew and grew and the campaign wanted — needed — to take it over and control it. Some of the info on the site wasn’t right, for example. This was not a random fan site, but the one MySpace page with his name in the URL. The person who created it then wanted to get paid for all the work he had done. Not happening. They should have spent the money and kept the fan. Now they have people running around all over the web calling them bullies.

You can read all about it on the techPresident blog.