Me.Tech()

The recent opening up of the facebook platform has created a rage in the industry. Facebook themselves , after opening up to public signups, have had an increase of 80% in their monthly uniques. The facebook platform is just another icing in the cake.

There are innumerable number of apps that are being created on the facebook platform. Existing applications like wordpress are taking heed and porting their apps into the platform. Some of the initial apps have been taken over and VC’s are announcing seed fund for apps built on the facebook platform. Its like everyone wants a part of the 26 Million uniques visiting the site and want to cash in on the phenomenon. So what did facebook do right ?

As I had written earlier in my barcamp post, it makes more sense for applications to be launched as a part of a larger community rather than brave the web alone. Social networks have proved time and again to be good source for informing people or attracting traffic to your site, essentially great place for marketing. Facebooks plans of monetizing the network had to make the site open to public , which they did by opening up to public signups. The next step was to innovate inside the network. Knowing very well that cramming features into facebook will not result in anything but chaos, facebook needed a serious shake up in terms of the features offered to the users. Rather than putting in the effort themselves, they put efforts into making a platform that allowed for people to build apps on top of the facebook community. This ensured a plentitude of apps and also increased pageviews because of these apps. Its a killer strategy.

The popularity of the platform speaks for itself with tons of apps being built on facebook and the increase in activity on the network. Does this mean we will see more social sites opening up to inorganic growth ? There’s no doubt sites like myspace and digg bring in large number of uniques to their site, but will they provide a way for external sites to tap into the community, if it guarantees them more pageviews and more uniques. This has an implication of spinning off into a business of its own in which you sell a community to a service provider. I call it community as a service.  Or will they risk deterioration in quality and increase of spam due opening up of their services and continue to stay organic. Its pretty obvious that the wealth of resources the platform got facebook was plenty but it was facebooks inherent security and privacy features that made sure that there was minimal exploitation.

Do you think your app can provide Community as a service ?