Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited
When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing.
Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future.
And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users.
You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be
delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered,
but injected into a massive social network.
While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced:
- Technical: Should the app be just a teaser that leads users to their site or should it be a duplicate and have full functionality?
- Business: If e.g. New York Times builds a Facebook app, will it be economic for them (since there's little revenue in Facebook)?
- Provider costs: Does it pay for Facebook to maintain the platform? As a business with a huge valuation, Facebook needs to maximise profit.
With these issues out in the open for the last year, the platform is suddenly not so compelling. How could this great idea go wrong?
The Technology Behind the Platform is Solid
There is little doubt Facebook's platform is revolutionary. Overnight it opened
access to a
massive audience. Big companies and startups just needed to write an app, submit it to the gallery and
they have access.
From the development view the platform is good. Sure there are quirks, but people can build apps. Security and scaleability are wired into its core and there are APIs and libraries in popular languages.
Teasers vs. Native Apps
Right now there are two types of Facebook applications:
teasers and native apps. A teaser exposes partial functions of the application and offers
users a click to leave Facebook to go to another site. Native apps are developed to run on
Facebook.
The problem is, any existing site wants to build a teaser application. Most sites make money on ads and they have existing ad infrastructure in place and all they need is traffic. This is a product management nightmare because it isn't clear what info should be exposed. And the user experience is bad because users dislike jumping between Facebook and other sites.
Some companies built copies of their apps that live entirely on Facebook and mimic the functionality of the real one. This solution creates both engineering and marketing problems. Maintaining a duplicate code base is costly, and messaging users to come to the website or Facebook page is confusing. And the issue of monetization on Facebook remains.
The applications that live only on Facebook are clear winners. These are custom-designed for the platform.
Show Me The Money
Unlike Apple, Facebook did not build an infrastructure for paid applications. The only way to monetize
the apps is via advertising. Yet social networks aren't natural for targeted ads.
Certainly ads are served in
pages, but their effectiveness has still to be determined .
Specifically, if talking about a large news site like New York Times, there's no way it can match its native ads on Facebook. New York Times sells high-CPM ads and has polished its targeting mechanism. Plain Facebook ads can't match that.
An app is free to serve more ads on its own Facebook pages, but then the reader will be seeing two types of ads and the ratio of ads to content becomes unbearable.
It would be an advance if Facebook would enable companies to plug in their own ads into the sidebar areas, but currently there's no such infrastrucure. We're not seeing clear and comparable monetization on Facebook as it exists on original sites.
The User Problem
Out of thousands of applications, only a
handful gain sizable audience. Whose fault is this? Again this isn't a simple issue. How many apps can
a user want? The apps that
win audiences initially get progressively bigger, making it harder for new apps. Because there's no
pay-to-play, there's a lot of noise.
Users have too much choice. What seems like a great idea (let users choose the apps) quickly leads to this: users try a few apps and conclude that apps aren't interesting. Users are confused with the amount of choice.
What's the solution? Not really clear, but the current situation can't last much longer.
Platforms Are About Risk Management
With the platform not working out well for either Facebook or
its users, the company is taking action.
The changes are aimed at simplification and toning down the apps.
At this point it will be a welcome change for the users, but application makers will feel screwed just a year after the fanfare and all the money spent on building the apps. Providers have done nothing but good for this platform, making things work quickly.
Platforms, Web Services and APIs are not just money makers. Platforms come with responsibility. Amid the never-ending marketing war, the rush and pressure tends to push out stuff that's half-baked.
Perhaps it's time to take a lesson from the 90s. Back then, when companies bought libraries from software vendors, these came with commitment. Solutions were customer-driven because people paid to use them. Vendors worked hard to make things backwards compatible. Platform providers understood and respected the risk people took relying on their systems, and they assumed responsibility because they were paid.
Perhaps if Facebook charged for access to its audience, things would be more businesslike. Once again, free comes back full circle and backfires.
Conclusion
The Facebook platform was certainly a big event in technology. As the first open system to enable access to a huge audience, it's a triumph. But its future is clouded because of its business infrastructure, improper user education, and almost anarchic delivery of the applications. With the imminent changes, larger players will have even less incentive to plug in.
Only time will tell what it means for the futrure of the platform. Hopefully Facebook leadership will find the right path.
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This is a decent (kinda flat) summary of the past 9 months or so ... but, really, the fanboys were suckers, the F8 platform didn't revolutionize anything (except fling cows at your friends) and the bloggers helped hype Facebook into an absurd valuation.
Did I miss something?
Agreed. There are ZERO applications of any value on facebook. Fling cows, super poke, Zombie Friends - it's all useless, time-destroying crap.
Well titled. The words Fanfare and Facebook go well together. I would like to include Starbucks in the fanfare category, but unlike profile sites, coffee is an essential item for me.
Many apps are worse than useless; they're essentially viruses designed to spread and serve ads as quickly as possible. Everyone was so caught up in the happy cumbaya spirit of web 2.0 that they forgot that a huge portion of app developers would just be looking to make a quick buck.
I can't agree more. I took a long time to jump into creating a facebook account, because i just didn't care about social networks. With all the buzz over the last year about the platform and the continued tinkering of the core site functionality I jumped in and I can't really see where all the killer apps are (are there any?).
I also can't understand why facebook can't open the page up a little. Monitors are big: make the display page bigger. The site gets progressively dumber looking and more difficult to use with ever app that a user adds (scrolling and scrolling, etc).
A different model might be based on sites not using Facebook as a promotional/acquisition channel, but rather as a provider of social-oriented complementary services. Not unlike FriendFeed as an aggregator of people and their multiple output streams.
I don't agree that they have a solid platform. I've read somewhere that they have 1800 mysql servers 900 master 900 slaves.
How can you claim that you have a solid platform with these numbers.
Take flickr as an example. 2 masters and everything works just fine...
Wikipedia is another one.
I think platform is not as solid as facebook's photos platform. Photo guys work harder than the platform guys.
anyways. my 2 cent.s
I found this an interesting piece also, but I don't agree with the negative comments of the previous posters...
The whole point about having an open or semi-open platform is just that - they are open or semi-open. One only needs to look at the amount of totally useless Apps already in the more tightly contolled Apple iTunes App Store, to see that that's just the way the World of App development and App proliferation works currently.
I agree that there are not many applications on Facebook (yet) that are actually useful, but there are some there if you look hard enough (if you pay enough attention to RWW articles, they profile most of them when they surface - love your work BTW guys!).
At the end of the day the onus on maintaining the content of a Facebook Profile falls on the user and their individual preferences - if you have friends that have cluttered, messy Facebook Profiles, you are more likely to find that reflects their personalities - their bedrooms probably look the same! LOL
;)
We are beginning to see more and more "Ads" ...SCAMS? promising to teach people how to make money on Facepage...like they did for Google, Yahoo, ebay etc.
The article presents an objective view of Facebooks monetization potential. It would be a good that this article be promtoed amongst the type of audience that hopes to get rich through internet schemes.
Good article man. I was in a big confusion how facebook works, but your article gave me a complete information about facebook. From this article I came to know that facebook is a no profit organization.
It was overhyped, but it now it just deliver confusion. Too many copy cat apps chasing a jaded audience fed up of "invitations"
There are so many apps that i makes no sense.
There are more than 500 apps just for sending virtual gifts and they copied Free Gifts which copies Facebook Gifts which copied Live Journal et al.
I publish a board game called GiftTRAP that's about exchanging virtual gifts that's won all sorts of international acclaim and awards. It's in Barnes & Noble right now. (see http://www.gifttrap.com for more info)
We've recently completed our Facebook App; http://apps.facebook.com/gifttrap/
I think were a perhaps little late, but its a pretty cool app that's very different than all the other gift apps. Here your friend get to choose their gift, not just you!
It's a fun way to train your friends on the gift you really like
My sense is people are fed up with forced invites and bemuzed by the vast array of apps. It's no wonder people flock to the well known apps.
I hope they do something to cut back on the number of apps.
Perhaps just keeping changing the platform will frustrate enough developers to solve the problem.
I think they even offer free hosting which is just bizarre.
.
I heard that Facebook is not only the place for applications. But now a days people are using to market their products through facebook. Is it true?
We are currently working on a project using a facebook app and a copy of it in the web or vise versa. The advantage is that facebook and their apps are not as well known in Europe (we are from Switzerland) as they are in the US.
However it's exactly how you say. How will we get the users on the right application without confusing them?
What I wonder as well is, how you get things started on facebook, if you have no big community there?
open your platform to wider audience always bring innovation - however do agree where is the "Money"?