Christopher Golda

Mesh Should Old Media Be Afraid of New Media?

The single most mentioned company at the mesh conference this week was Facebook. It’s because the platform is exciting news for the types of people that attended: the geeks and VCs get excited because widget-style companies have a new safe-haven; the press get excited because they can report this as an attack on MySpace. However, in the “Barbarians at the Gate - Should Old Media Be Afraid of New Media?” panel conversation, Loren Feldman made a very interesting comment about Facebook: he said that Platform has turned them into the closed-system AOL of Web 2.0. Contrast this with Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook f8 developer event keynote in which he said,

We can look around and we can see that people are already building social applications — they just need to try to interface and reconstruct the whole “social graph” themselves in order to do that. Facebook Platform is going to solve that problem, and it’s not just going to enable people to build social applications, it’s going to make it so that developers world-wide can do completely new things. Right now social networks are closed platforms and today we’re going to end that. With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer world-wide is going to be able to build full applications on top of the “social graph” inside of the Facebook framework

Stage Fright Mark Zuckerberg giving his keynote

He claims three benefits of Facebook Platform:

1. Deep integration into the Facebook site
2. Mass distribution with the “social graph”
3. New business opportunity

On MySpace, the problem is that you can’t work with the “social graph” and there’s less business opportunity. On Facebook, the problem is that you have to work inside of the Facebook framework. This brings me to one of my main points: despite what Zuckerberg says, Facebook is still a closed platform — applications have to be built on the Facebook “canvas” with the usability issues, branding, etc that accompany it. While deep integration into the Facebook site may be attractive to application developers, the integration may not be deep enough for applications that aim to solve core problems.

In Paul Kedrosky’s “Facebook is Microsoft Office of Social Apps”, he points out that none of the Facebook applications are as good as their counterparts; the only reason they are successful is because all of them are available in one place. Zuckerberg doesn’t hide this fact — in his keynote he explained how Facebook photos is missing several important features that competitors have. He claims the success of Facebook applications are due to the “social graph”, defined as the network of connections through which people share information and communicate.

The Platform is designed to serve the long tail with periphery applications. If they ever explain how to use Platform they will definitely see more users and traffic, but I also believe it presents a huge opportunity for competitors. Users don’t care about the majority of applications — they only care about applications that solve problems they experience. However, we know from Kedrosky a priori that core applications designed to solve these problems are done poorly on Facebook. More importantly, periphery applications balkanize the context for interaction, minimizing the SNR and the potential for value creation by core applications. Before the Platform was announced, the context for interaction on Facebook had already been slowly balkanizing since networks were opened up to companies, individuals and organizations — the school-related context for interaction slowly deteriorated. The opportunity for competitors exists for anyone bold enough to recreate the “social graph” with a strong context for interaction and build better core applications.

Addendum: It’s easy to identify core applications for social-networks — they are the applications that create the most value from relationships. Hint: there is only one application since the launch of Platform that has more than 1mm users: iLike.

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