Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t referring to Facebook – the world’s largest social networking site. I was referring to facebook.com – the URL. With recent announcement of Facebook that it is opening parts of its code to the public, third party developers can now build Facebook applications that will let users interact with most of the elements of Facebook (status updates, sharing of photos and links, etc.) without ever visiting Facebook.com itself.
For my layman brothers having trouble understanding the concept, this is like Twitter in action. If you are an avid user of Twitter, you will know that there is multitude of ways to post your messages (tweet) aside from visiting twitter.com site itself. There’s tweetdeck, twitterrific, twitterfeed among others.
Anyway, using the Facebook Open Stream API, software developers can build different (thousands, millions) websites and integrate Facebook functionalities into it. This thing can be a boon or a bane depending on which angle you look at it. Some say it will mean loss of advertising revenue for Facebook while some developers like the idea as it can leverage on Facebook’s “viral” power – an effective tool to market a product or service.
The way I see it, Facebook will not do this if it will not tremendously benefit from it. (not just plain jane benefit but tremendous!). Maybe the obvious loss of advertising revenue can easily be gleaned at this time as major bulk of its revenue comes from advertisement. However, times are a-changin’ and I see some genius behind this idea. By opening up to more developers, Facebook will become more and more ubiquitous shielding itself from irrelevance and mediocrity. And when it happens, business model will come, trust me. When Google started, nobody can also figure out how an internet search company will generate a profit. Google did not pay attention to its critics and it just proceeded with generating a great user experience. Look at where Google is now.
Currently, Facebook is arguably the top social networking platform that has been able to integrate third party applications (gaming, business, events, etc) very well into its site. This time around, Facebook might want to do it the other way around.
At the end of the day, Facebook.com (the URL) is still not shutting down. In plain and simple terms, it’s just launching an attack – front and back. Clever.
For my layman brothers having trouble understanding the concept, this is like Twitter in action. If you are an avid user of Twitter, you will know that there is multitude of ways to post your messages (tweet) aside from visiting twitter.com site itself. There’s tweetdeck, twitterrific, twitterfeed among others.
Anyway, using the Facebook Open Stream API, software developers can build different (thousands, millions) websites and integrate Facebook functionalities into it. This thing can be a boon or a bane depending on which angle you look at it. Some say it will mean loss of advertising revenue for Facebook while some developers like the idea as it can leverage on Facebook’s “viral” power – an effective tool to market a product or service.
The way I see it, Facebook will not do this if it will not tremendously benefit from it. (not just plain jane benefit but tremendous!). Maybe the obvious loss of advertising revenue can easily be gleaned at this time as major bulk of its revenue comes from advertisement. However, times are a-changin’ and I see some genius behind this idea. By opening up to more developers, Facebook will become more and more ubiquitous shielding itself from irrelevance and mediocrity. And when it happens, business model will come, trust me. When Google started, nobody can also figure out how an internet search company will generate a profit. Google did not pay attention to its critics and it just proceeded with generating a great user experience. Look at where Google is now.
Currently, Facebook is arguably the top social networking platform that has been able to integrate third party applications (gaming, business, events, etc) very well into its site. This time around, Facebook might want to do it the other way around.
At the end of the day, Facebook.com (the URL) is still not shutting down. In plain and simple terms, it’s just launching an attack – front and back. Clever.
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