The justification was that Mozilla was doing a better job hosting and promoting the add-ons, and the majority were the same for Flock and Firefox. Since Flock does not have enough resources to support the extension site, Evan announced the decision to "cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system". (Note the keyword 'fat', it will be important in the rest of the post).

In itself this move was not surprising. Flock's team has just released version 2.0 of its social browser and has other battles to fight. IE8 is coming out soon with innovative features. Mozilla is racing forward with Ubiquity and the upcoming Geo-aware Firefox 3.1. And Google threw its hat into the browser ring with Chrome, so competition is getting tight. For Flock to be a player in the browser market, it needs a razor focus on building a base of diehard fans. Extensions are not helping much in that respect, they're an expense, so it was logical to cut them.

Facebook Platform - The Big Up and The Big Let Down

When the Facebook platform was unveiled in 2007, it was called genius. Never before had a company in a single stroke enabled others to tap into millions of its users completely free. The platform was hailed as a game changer under the famous mantra "we built it and they will come". And they did come, hundreds of companies rushing to write Facebook applications. Companies and VC funds focused specifically on Facebook apps.

It really did look like a revolution, but it didn't last. The first reason was that Facebook apps quickly arranged themselves on a power law curve. A handful of apps (think Vampires, Byte Me and Sell My Friends) landed millions of users, but those in the pack had hardly any. The second problem was, ironically, the bloat. Users polluted their profiles with Facebook apps and no one could find anything in their profiles. Facebook used to be simple - pictures, wall, friends. Now each profile features a zoo of heterogenous apps, each one trying to grab the user's attention to take advantage of the network effect. Users are confused.

Worst of all, the platform had no infrastructure to monetize the applications. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived on the scene and looked at the balance sheet, she spotted the hefty expense that was the Facebook platform. Trying to live up to a huge valuation isn't easy, and in the absense of big revenues people rush to cut costs. Since it was both an expense and users were confused less than a year after its glorious launch, Facebook decided to revamp its platform.

The latest release of Facebook, which was released in July, makes it nearly impossible for new applications to take advantage of the network effect. Now users must first install the application, then find it under the application menu or one of the tabs, then check a bunch of boxes to add it to their profile (old applications are grand-daddied in). Facebook has sent a clear message to developers - the platform is no longer a priority.

Google's OpenSocial and The Me Too Syndrome

Apparently Google was threatened by the Facebook platform. Its quick response was OpenSocial, the open platform for social applications. Unlike Facebook, which was proprietary and closed, Google's was open to everyone. When OpenSocial was announced, techies raised their eyebrows - it looked raw and unpolished. Some of the existing iGoogle container APIs were mixed in with a new contact sharing library. But, being Google, a lot of people signed up to support it.

Fast forward one year later and how much has been done? Well some companies did implement some elements, but the overall buzz died. Why wouldn't Google put more resources and marketing behind it? Because now it doesn't matter. The Facebook platform play is over and so the marketing strategy called Opensocial is not a top priority for the search giant anymore.

Why Apple's App Store Will Be Different

Next we turn to the latest platform getting buzz, Apple's iPhone App Store. At first glance it's much like Facebook, but in reality it isn't. Firstly, the user profiles aren't visible - you can't see applications installed on your iPhone. Each user can decide which apps to get, based on a simple review-based dashboard. There's no promise of a massive network effect, although there's a simpler user experience.

Importantly, Apple wired the monetization into the App Store right from the start. Sure there are free applications, but for companies that want to invest resources and play on the iPhone for a long time, there is an instant, simple opportunity to monetize. Note that paid applications get priority listing in the App Store, which is no accident.

Apple took care of the most important part of the equation - the transaction. It was also able to insert itself in the middle and recoup some costs associated with building the App Store. In the future, if it takes off and sustains the growth, App Store will ring in significant revenue for Apple. Jobs and his team were smart to wire monetization into the platform at the outsert.

The Future of Platforms

Where does all this leave us? Certainly it's absurd to say that having Web platforms is a bad idea. Yet we're left with a bitter taste in our mouths after the latest moves from some big platform players. The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization. Here are some questions that companies need to ask themselves before delivering a platform:

• Why are we building a platform?
• How will we monetize this platform?
• Will the platform make us money, and how much will it cost?
• How will applications be able to monetize the platform?
• Can we support the platform for years to come?

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook's momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

Let us know what you think about the opportunities to plug into major platforms? What are your thoughts on the recent platform dynamics that we have witnessed?

While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced:

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.

Initially we thought this would be an ineffective effort, but the more we looked at terrible ads on Facebook and thought about how happy we'd be to vote them down - the more sense it made.

On Brand Advertising

There are of course a wide variety of ads in the world and on Facebook in particular. Charlene Li reported an unusually high success rate for her "Facebook Flyer" test ad in October, but that was a call to action that some portion of her audience had a more vested interest in than we do in most Facebook ads.

Brand ads are intended to build brand association with audiences and in those cases voting from audiences could make sense. Do you like seeing ads from this known brand or that one in your social networking site? That makes sense, as the primary intention behind such ads isn't click through - it's just awareness.

Crap Control

The majority of ads we see on Facebook's sidebar "social ads" section aren't brand ads though. They are crap. They are personal ads, debt relief services and other things most of us could care less about.

The more we think about it, the better the opportunity to vote down such ads sounds. We can't help but wonder how many Facebook users would pay a small fee to remove ads all-together from the site.

Facebook has done something similar with applications, allowing apps that get installed more often to have more access to the Newsfeed. The company is clearly experimenting with both using both implicit and explicit gestures to determine quality on the site.

That sounds smart.

Voting may not have worked well in the Newsfeed, but that could be because the visual prompt to vote was too intrusive. Offering one place to vote, just on ads in the sidebar, should be less annoying to users.

We're not seeing options this extensive yet, what are you seeing when you vote on the ads in the Facebook sidebar?

Facebook is now planning to follow Google's lead and open source their platform. Previously, Facebook's platform technology only powered an app development platform on one site outside its own -- that of rival social networking site, bebo (recently acquired by AOL). An open sourced platform means that any social network could implement Facebook applications. More details should emerge in the next couple of days, according to TechCrunch, who broke the story.

Two questions immediately spring to mind following this news: 1. Does this help users? 2. Do platforms even matter?

Does An Arms Race Benefit Users

The short answer here is: no. Exposing key parts of the social networking experience as open source projects seems like it should be beneficial to users, but for as much as the companies involved talk about openness, there is clearly a lot at stake here. Google and Facebook certainly want some amount of control over user data (so far, major players here have only paid lip service to data portability) and social applications. The latest round of developments in the social networking API world have seemed a lot like a series of power grabs.

As Steve O'Hear wrote yesterday on ZDNet, "One widely supported and open standard, not two, would be in the interests of the industry as a whole."

Do Platforms Even Matter?

A quick look at the app galleries on Facebook, MySpace, or any other mainstream social network might lead you to say, "Who cares? All these apps are trivial junk anyway." And that might not be a false statement -- we even noted in January that Facebook users seemed to be losing interest in applications, and in November we argued that Facebook's users and user experience trump any app platform.

But Facebook's coming new profile design is clearly reminiscent of an operating system. As Facebook tries to become the mainstream everything, control over the dominant social application development platform on the web ends up mattering a lot.

Conclusion

Try as it might to shed its "fun" image by adding more granular privacy controls, and cleaning up its profile design, Facebook is still associated with "college socializing," the same way MySpace is still associated with high school (even though both web sites count users above college age as their fastest growing areas). One major strategic advantage that Google has gained via its Open Social iron curtain is that it has hooks in different types of social networks -- high school, college, business, international, regional, or anything in between (via Ning). That's a major selling point for social app developers choosing a platform.

Unfortunately, a platform arms race benefits no one except the eventual winner (if there is one). What would benefit users is a single, open platform standard, and a real commitment to data portability by all social networks.

With the top social networks having 183 million users, 70% of them being 15-34 year olds, Bizzlr realized there was a real need to provide tools to businesses that wouldn't otherwise have the ability to reach their customers on these platforms.

To aid these businesses in expanding their reach, Bizzlr has just launched their turnkey solution, which comes  in the form of an social network application and is currently available on Facebook, MySpace, and Hi5. Support for Bebo, LinkedIn, and Ning is said to be coming soon. The application supports both the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API, so it will work on most of the major social networks.

With Bizzlr, companies, even small ones that don't have their own web site, can connect with their customers quickly and easily on the social networks where their customers spend their time. The fee for doing so is an affordable $19.95/month (or $199/year), so it's not out of the reach of any mom-and-pop shop.

How It Works

Bizzlr uses proprietary algorithms to target customers based on their tastes and preferences. These customers can then easily share the business with their friends, via a modern-day word-of-mouth referral.

For the company using Bizzlr, the app can be a promotional tool used post specials and coupons for their customers to enjoy, as well as a way to maintain a profile page listing their information, phone number, and other news about their company.

Bizzlr in Action

For customers, there's no need to worry about unwanted spam or tracking from these Bizzlr or the companies using it - you have the choice to install the Bizzlr app or not, just like you do with anything else on a social network.

The New Word-of-Mouth

At the moment, Bizzlr focuses on the food and restaurant industry, but will soon be expanding into healthcare, childcare, nightlife, and more.

When trying the tool today, I actually found that it could be pretty useful. I added it on Facebook and entered in my city in the Location box. I could then search for restaurants and add them to "My Restaurants." When adding a new restaurant, you're prompted to tag it, but suggested tags are displayed and pre-checked for you. (Nice!)

On the next screen that appears, you can then see the restaurant's current popularity (both on Bizzlr and with your friends), see it on the map, read news & find coupons (if available), follow the restaurant's activity on Bizzlr, rate the restaurant, add your own comments, and discover similar restaurants. As a final, and optional, step, you can choose to tell a friend about the restaurant. Heck, this is a whole Web 2.0 app built within a social network!

Of course, like so many things, the value in Bizzlr will be directly related to how many people start using it, but if the company can break through that barrier and get enough customers and businesses on board, this could certainly take off.

You were sick of throwing sheep at each other on Facebook anyway, weren't you?

"Integrating with Frengo was a breeze and we really appreciate their experience and expertise in mobile. With Frengo we can extend our social experiences to people on mobile phones around the world," said Jia Shen, CTO of RockYou, a launch partner with Frengo on the toolkit. RockYou's "Horoscopes" application is available to mobile users via the Frengo toolkit. Other customers of Frengo include Slide, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Serious Business, and Frozen Bear.

Lance Takuda of RockYou recently confirmed to us that there are slight differences in the Open Social deployments on MySpace and Hi5, and the Facebook platform deployments on Faceook and Bebo. He told us there's about a "20% overhead in supporting" the different deployments of each platform (though going platform-to-platform basically requires a rewrite). It seems likely that because of these differences, the Frengo toolkit includes slightly different bits of code for working with each social network.

It is, of course, not out of the realm of possibility that social networks could build mobile functionality directly into their platforms. Both Facebook and MySpace have been pushing their mobile versions hard recently -- MySpace just partnered with Sprint and Verizon and RIM just announced a million Facebook users on Blackberry -- and it is plausible that they could push developers to the mobile space themselves. Facebook especially has some serious mobile chops with Joe Hewitt on staff, whose iUI is already one of the most popular iPhone frameworks.

While app developers will appreciate the ease in doing so, the integration of communication paths could hit a sweet spot for companies overwhelmed with the number of social network options they face. Ringside Networks would create a central place to communicate across any number of networks through any application that resides on them all.

How will Ringside navigate the closely guarded privacy of Facebook social graph information in particular? We'll see!

Details are still sketchy about the company, but Ringside's got the ear of several heavy hitters in the Open Source world. Matt Asay wrote up a general review of the effort at CNet last week and called it "one of the most interesting open-source opportunities in the market today." The company has taken funding from the prestigious Matrix Partners.

Some more hints are available on Bickel's blog, Thoughts from the Ringside.

While all the different containers in OpenSocial drag their feet and splinter their offerings, it makes perfect sense for an Open Source, standards-based competitor to step in and put their money where their mouths are. The company promises lots of API extensibility, as well.

The Ringside website won't go live until probably Tuesday morning, West Coast time, but you might be able to get in touch using the old info email form they had posted until recently. This should be one worth watching.

What does more restricted space for applications means? Facebook hopes that it translates to better apps. In a blog post last Friday alerting developers of the upcoming changes, Facebook encouraged "application developers to focus on building applications that facilitate communication, generate meaningful activity, and increase users' trust," noting that any applications that "don't provide value and meaning for users" would face "challenges" under the new profile layout.

We noted last month that Facebook applications may have peaked in popularity and that a lot of people are beginning to feel "app fatigue." We suggested then that the solution for developers to overcome app fatigue, and to overcome stricter rules being imposed by Facebook about how applications can be spread via invites was simple: make better applications.

Facebook's looming profile design changes seem to be aimed squarely at the large number of apps that have been developed for its platform that don't add much utility. Once upon a time, people flocked to Facebook in large part because it had a cleaner design than rival social networks. But the launch of the Platform last May started Facebook down the road toward cluttered profiles like this one. Clearly, the social network is attempting to push people toward trimming down their use of applications that provide little utility, and rather focusing on applications that offer "meaningful activity," as they phrase it.

This is a long term strategy for Facebook. In the near term, getting people to stop using silly apps (or at least place less emphasis on them and use them less) means fewer page views and less ad inventory. But in the long term, getting developers to create more apps that have real utility for people, will get more people to rely on Facebook for more of their daily activity -- which furthers the goal of building the Facebook platform into a web operating system.

It is, however, important to take these changes with a grain of salt. What Facebook is showing off now is early in the design process and is not set to drop until Spring, so changes are certainly possible. The social network is inviting users to participate in the design process by giving feedback on iterations of the new profile design.

What do you think of Facebook's planned tabbed profiles? Will it result in better apps? Will diminish the clutter that has begun to take hold of many Facebook profiles? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

What happened? Well, for one, the Facebook platform happened. The Facebook platform allowed application developers to flood the site with applications, both useful and not (by many accounts, mostly not), and because of the way it is set up, app developers were able to encourage, and sometimes force or trick, users into sending out mass invites, notifications, or new feed announcements about often times trivial matters. This increased the noise on the Facebook network ten fold, and decreased the enjoyment of the social networks for some people.

Users, though, are beginning to push back. In just over a month, more than 65,000 people have joined the No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application! group, which has spun off an ancillary group that catalogues the applications that require users to invite friends before even using the app. And over 4,200 people have signed a petition calling on Facebook to step in and stop developers from using the "forced invite" tactic to grow their apps virally.

Further, blogger Alex Saunders points to recent statistics from Adonomics that indicate that the top Facebook apps have recently seen significant dips in the number of active users. "All of the top 10 leaderboard applications have seen substantial drops in daily users since peaking in November and December," writes Saunders. The chart below is from his site:

	Peak	Today
Funwall	5800	2500
Superwall	4800	1800
Top Friends	2900	2200
Likeness	821	181
Super poke	1500	500
Movies	814	500
Compare People	1000	471
iLike	941	372
Causes	469	110
Superlatives	320	110
	All figures in 1,000s

It is important to note that not all (if any) of these applications employ forced invites or tricky user invite schemes. Nonetheless, the drop in active users is telling, and is perhaps indicative of a Facebook populace that is beginning to get fed up with application noise or is getting tired of applications in general. It is certainly possible that the novelty has begun to wear off, and users are no longer interested in trying every hot new app under the sun, and have grown weary of some of the apps they were once so fond of.

One of the most annoying apps on Facebook -- at least in my opinion -- "Pirates vs. Ninjas," is way down off its November peak as well, according to Adonomics. What would make an app slide from over 165,000 daily users to 24,000 in just a couple of months? It's hard to say, but perhaps users have begun to grow tired of noveltly apps that don't do much else except spam their friends with invites to join the application.

App Fatigue: A Good Thing?

I wrote earlier that users suffering from app fatigue and pushing back against apps that employ sneaky invite schemes to grow is a good thing, and I think it probably is. Assuming Facebook steps in and imposes stricter invite rules -- which they should, applications will need to find different ways to spread virally. If people are simultaneously beginning to suffer from app fatigue (or app apathy -- appathy?), there is really only one sure fire way to get apps to spread virally: make better applications!

There are now 15,422 apps on the Facebook platform -- how many of them are truly useful? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the novelty has worn off and users are finally starting to demand more of the applications they install. As Alex Saunders writes, "Developers of Facebook applications, however, have reached a watershed that demands a focus on delivering utility and value rather than thinly disguised advertising vehicles."

What do you think? Are you suffering from Facebook app fatigue? Do you think Facebook should step in and tighten invite rules for developers? Sound off in the comments below.