I'm sitting here trying to digest all of the Facebook news and analysis in order to understand what it really means for widget publishers. I'm not there yet - I have some questions out to a few folks to get some clarification, but I will post more when I feel like I have a better handle.
So far, the two most interesting things that I've read have both come from Rafe Needleman. Point 1 is his take about music discovery and recommendation service iLike that is one of Facebook's flagship application partners.
Partovi isn't yet sure what will happen to his original site, iLike.com. I get the impression that he fully expects the Facebook version of the site to quickly outstrip the traffic on the original site, and certainly there's no way iLike.com will be able to approach the community numbers that Facebook has.
I find this as a pretty chilling self-assessment from one of the stronger, better backed destination social networks out there. iLike has cash, a powerful corporate backer in Ticketmaster, and an incredible product. Yet they don't see a future as an independent destination site. This speaks volumes to me. They see widgets not as a nice marketing tool, but as the reason for them to exist.
Rafe's second point is on how it's the Facebook News Feed that holds all of this stuff together:
A controversial feature when it was introduced in September of 2006, the Facebook News Feed is going to be central to this new open system. It's the glue that binds the new services and their users together on the Facebook network. The feed will alert users when their friends interact with a new f8 service--when they listen to music, rent movies, buy things, and so on. It might lead to feed overload, but Facebook users will soon know a whole lot more about what their friends are up to. It will be like Twitter, but automatic.
One of the reasons I've been slow to jump on the Twitter bandwagon is my belief that implicit services are inherently more participatory than explicit services. In other words, while Twitter is certainly a fun little app, I was struggling to believe that a service like Twitter that requires you to explicitly publish data, will ever see the participation rates that would make it a game changer.
Rafe's characterization of the News Feed component of Facebook as an implicit Twitter is dead on.
The feed is the key! Now posting an application is another part of the shared experience. Each individual API activity will be thriving on the feed forever...lets just hope it doesn't become overwhelming for the end user.
Now imagine if Myspace partnered up with one of the widget aggregators, and allowed widget announcements almost like Myspace bulletins!
Their system certainly isn't as personable as Facebooks, so there would be less attention paid to the updates, but it would certainly impact the landscape. I hope Myspace makes some move soon...unless they plan on giving the crown away to Facebook!
Posted by: Marco Hansell | May 27, 2007 at 07:14 AM
The feed is the key! Now posting an application is another part of the shared experience. Each individual API activity will be thriving on the feed forever...lets just hope it doesn't become overwhelming for the end user.
Now imagine if Myspace partnered up with one of the widget aggregators, and allowed widget announcements almost like Myspace bulletins!
Their system certainly isn't as personable as Facebooks, so there would be less attention paid to the updates, but it would certainly impact the landscape. I hope Myspace makes some move soon...unless they plan on giving the crown away to Facebook!
Posted by: Marco Hansell | May 27, 2007 at 07:17 AM