With the Facebook Platform’s launch and the thousands of independent 3rd party web application developers that have jumped onboard, Facebook’s biggest competitors are reacting quickly to follow suit.
What does this mean?
It means that Facebook is winning the race -- that race being to populate the Internet with people-powered content that is open and shared.
- Last week, Reid Hoffman told Dan Farber that LinkedIn would be announcing platform-esque capabilities later this year:
“Over the next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook…”
- A few days ago, Chris DeWolfe told the Financial Times that MySpace is basically going to follow suit and open up more than it ever has before:
“MySpace is likely to change its technology strategy to allow other online companies to ‘plug’ their web services directly into its social networking site…’The [Facebook] platform is interesting,’ Mr. DeWolfe said.”
With the advent of the Facebook Platform, many entrepreneurs have realized how much harder it is to convince people to build their social network on a new platform than to get them to share a new application with their network where they already are.
Aka, for the last few years...it's been all about creating new social-networking Sites, but now Facebook has made the application plug-in business model a legit possibility like never before.
As the consolidation of social-graph building onto core networking platforms continues into the coming year, expect to see other social networks, Web 2.0 Sites, and even corporations begin to follow suit with much more open APIs.
What does open APIs mean? It means more mash-ups, more developers, more creativity, more utilities, more business models, and more Web 2.0 doo-dads that most people haven't even thought possible.
The Facebook Platform is going to show corporations the value of building a third party application ecosystem around their “platform."
The bottom line....Facebook is in the driver's seat with strong and visionary leadership behind the wheel.
