Hm. At 6 points in 3 hours, I don't see this article on the front page, even though this is:
"6.
Google announces purge of ad-heavy sites (nypost.com)
4 points by jkush 5 hours ago | discuss"
[Edit: Either Firefox's text search and I missed this, or it's been restored to the front page.]
And the article is weak. They're complaining that Facebook is competing with Twitter. Why would you fault someone for doing what other people do, but better? And why would you care if they do it worse?
Don't think so. Facebook are pretty good at what they do. But saying that for USD12.5M you should be. What will kill them is if they don't listen to users and adapt. Social software has downsides.
There's an old saying if you work in a family business and get on the wrong side of one. Your toast. This could have profound effects on social software sites that peeve pivot point members who leave and their community follows.
It's entirely relevant, and not entirely untrue. With the "platform" launching there will likely be dozens or hundreds of young companies building tools that work with Facebook. If Facebook eats all profitable niches (as they seem more than willing to do, as shown by the low-hanging fruit of classifieds), even if "partners" are living in them, there will be no room left for those young companies.
I'd steer well clear of building anything that I expected to make money on for Facebook.
It now makes sense when Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo, saying that he thinks they can do it better. It's probably showing that facebook will be trying to prove that, whatever can be done off their userbase, they will prove that they can do it better. They have enough leverage to do anything that's social network related, and they are guaranteed that their userbase will be computer-literate enough (because those who aren't, know someone who is, just across the hall) to adapt to any new features.
Launching your business straight off of facebook's API is nothing but stupid. Fine, not stupid, but a risk that without a miracle, tremendously outweighs the benefits. You basically expose yourself as the guniea pig. Clear the minefield for your opposition to trot through. And functionally, it looks like you tap into a ready-made, enormous free pool of users, but financially (in the per user aspect), you have zero users.
Looking at the landscape it shouldn't be hard to predict what kinds of services they will be adding, at least in the next 6 months or so. A questions service is probably the next low-hanging fruit. By now, answeru.com should be worried, like, hell worried.
FB's API is probably good for data mining. Other than that I don't know what.
"... I'd steer well clear of building anything that I expected to make money on for Facebook. ..."
Been thinking about this problem. There is a trend at the moment for web2 companies creating apps, exposing API's then allowing third parties to use them. If this is a trend and consolidation occurs is it wise to use these API's? Will there be a choice as large numbers of users move to these online apps effectively recreating the monopolies that past operating systems had?
Could a solution be to spread the usage of API's across a larger number of services?
I've been researching widgets/gadgets a bit and the Netvibes API allows cross-platform widgets...which removes their monopoly power, and insures that even if they replicate your functionality, you can refocus on other sources of users.
So, if one were to abstract the Facebook API into a "social networks" API of your own, it'd be a sane path. Then, if Facebook launches an exact duplicate of your app, you just refocus your efforts on MySpace, Xanga, LinkedIn, whatever.
Of course, this assumes that the others follow the lead of Facebook (which I think is a great idea business-wise--APIs are great for business and good for your users...but not good for your "partners", if you have a habit of picking the winners and killing them with your own implementation).
So, I'm definitely not saying folks shouldn't make use of the Facebook API. But think about using it to add value to something already valuable, rather than just building tools that live and die by involvement with Facebook.
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