BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
27 Jan 2008

Web sites and services need to develop and harness a strategy to engage audiences away from their proprietary properties. Google won search by buying Applied Semantics, launching AdSense, and acquiring Sprinks to consolidate the contextual text link business. Yahoo! took a cue from Google last year by buying Blue Lithium and Right Media to extend its invisible hand away from Yahoo! properties (which remains the world’s largest property).

In the same spirit, Facebook has consistently opened up over the past 18 months: first by opening up to non-students, then by opening up their platform, then by launching a pretty open ad platform (in the sense that closed was restricted by privacy concerns) and Friday, they announced that, in the words of CNET’s VP of Editorial and Editor of ZDNet Dan Farber:

With this new library, the number of sites, and site owners, that can deploy Facebook applications just increased dramatically. All that remains is for someone to write a turn-key Facebook application creator, as Ning has already done for it’s own hosted social networks, and we can expect to see Facebook widgets rapidly proliferating across the Web.

In fact, Facebook is trying to stay one step ahead of competitors MySpace and Yahoo! and fend off Google’s OpenSocial initiative:

[The latest initiative] allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML without any server site scripting.

Henry Blodget is right: in a pure business strategy kind of way, this move is pretty smart. But let’s press pause and consider reality.

Facebook is a great tool, but it’s a cesspool.

Ever since Facebook opened up to non-students, it lost its focus. It was not the end of the world, because connections - which Facebook has mastered the database thereof - transcends being in school, granted. But once it opened its API and allowed a helluva bunch of crap to infest its site, Facebook is noisy, messy and frankly useless. It might not be competeley useless, yet, but give it more time and droves of users will flee it. Don’t take it from me, that is how history has treated every single social networking darling before it. To drive my point home, let’s revisit Farber’s comment that:

With this new library, the number of sites, and site owners, that can deploy Facebook applications just increased dramatically (…) We can expect to see Facebook widgets rapidly proliferating across the Web.

This is a good thing? If you’re anything like me, after the honeymoon stage (that being the period from when Facebook opened to non-students until the launch of the API program) I’ve found Facebook less and less useful and more and more chaotic.  What kind of social utility is that?  That’s a social burden.

When the day comes that developers build useful applications on Facebook, then maybe this is a welcome news. But so long as building an application on Facebook remains a risk to your business’ long term health, then this will be one small step for Facebook but one messy step for the Web.