Facebook is now scything through companies thanks to its compelling combination of MySpace, Flickr, forums and Friends Reunited, all done with a bit of taste.
It was started at Harvard in 2004 and spread virally through universities and colleges, but two things have made Facebook the hottest thing on the web this year. The first was offering membership to everyone. The second — which happened just two months ago — was launching an applications programming interface (API), enabling people to create programs for the site. The API turned Facebook into a development platform.
Opening up Facebook has pulled in a tidal wave of teenagers and older users, where “old” starts at about 25. According to research published last week by ComScore, the number of 12- to 17-year-old users grew by 149% over the past year, with 25- to 34-year-olds up by 181%. Unique visitors per month shot up from 14,1-million to 26,6-million. And that’s just in the United States.
Facebook doesn’t appeal to everyone, and social network expert Danah Boyd has seen what she calls an American class division: “Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.” But any successful social network — where people sign up their friends — is likely to go far.
Opening up the API has produced a flood of programs, and although most are trivial, a few have taken off. The most famous example is iLike, which lets people follow what their friends are listening to. It signed up about three million users in its first fortnight. iLike staff were emailing everyone they knew to borrow servers to cope with demand.
At first glance, Facebook’s API looks like a way to develop proprietary widgets of the sort that are already splattered across blogs, personalised portal pages and even desktops. Sudoku, local weather, Harry Potter quotes, a virtual lava lamp … there are already 1 590 of them, and many have yet to reach 50 users.
But it takes time for big companies to develop decent applications, and I think much better things are on the way. PayPal and the Zoho online office are already on board. The audience is just too big to ignore.
A more serious objection has been raised by blogger Jason Kottke, who says “Facebook is the new AOL”. It’s a closed garden and if you want to reach its users, you have to follow its rules. It gets worse, of course, because you might also have to develop custom apps for another dozen sites with their own proprietary platforms.
The alternative is a platform where anybody can develop apps and interoperate with everybody else using freely available tools, says Kottke. “It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007.”
He’s right in principle, but what if he’s wrong in practice? Developers might not like the idea of a Balkanised internet — with incompatible services dominant in different countries — but if Facebook users like what they’ve got, why should they care?
Some might see the internet as a confusing mess. They don’t want to waste time figuring out which sites are best: they don’t want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice. The success of Apple’s iPod strategy — connecting the portable music player with PC software and an online store — shows that people are happy to go for the packaged experience if it simplifies their lives.
But it may not last. Facebook is still a tiddler compared with AOL, which as recently as 2000 was powerful enough to take over the mighty CNN Time Warner media empire in a $164-billion deal. And how is AOL doing now? — Guardian Unlimited Â