BOILING FROGS
(Update below)
There's a lively discussion afoot on Techmeme around the Wall Street Journal article today on Facebook's grand plans. The article leads off with the following:
"Facebook Inc. has bucked the Silicon Valley acquisition trend, remaining independent of larger technology companies. Now the social-networking start-up is seeking ways to reach the big leagues on its own.
On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users' networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter."
This move should come as no surprise to long-time users, fans, and followers of Facebook. It's merely the next logical step in it's grand plan to what I'd call "de-portalizing" the internet.
Over the long haul, the service is attempting to make grand portals like Yahoo!, MSN and even Google's personalized services to some extent, less important to the individual user.
But rather, the user's own identity online on Facebook, would become a personalized portal through which to view the constantly shifting relationships that matter most to that individual.
The recent addition of classifieds to the service is an example of this strategy.
From my perspective, what Facebook could potentially mean for me on the web, would be to make my Facebook page on the service, the primary, truly personalized portal, or daily dashboard, through which I would increasingly interact with the world online. Even more so than my blog.
In fact, Facebook was unique amongst social networking platforms a few months ago, when it allowed me to import my existing blog entries painlessly as daily notes into my Facebook page. This TechCrunch post on this features explains it in more detail.
Most other social networking services from start-ups to efforts by Yahoo!, Google, etc., expected me to create yet another blog on my personalized page on their service. Wasn't going to do that. Too much work to maintain multiple blogs.
Facebook understood that. They took a differentiated approach that made it far easier for me to integrate what's already important to me on the web, into my presence on their platform. Brilliant.
I would be re-miss not to add that News Corp.'s MySpace is following a similar strategy, but with far fewer controls on how the user interacts with the full network than Facebook. In that sense, the difference between the two services, other than the presumed demographics and interests of their respective audiences, is that Facebook has far more rules on what can and cannot be done on it's service, than MySpace.
For example, I'm limited to the number of regional networks I can join on Facebook, and have to choose one amongst many networks that I may be interested in seeing daily on my Facebook dashboard. This is frustrating on a personal level, since I have meaningful sets of real-life relationships in multiple geographical regions. (Silicon Valley, New York, and Los Angeles, as examples in this case, not to mention multiple places overseas).
It remains to be seen whether these types of restrictions matter to Facebook's ultimate success. On a personal level, at this time, this makes Facebook less useful to me on a daily basis than it otherwise would be.
And assuming this new strategy to be announced this week takes hold, other web companies would help facilitate the next growth phase of the service, in a way similar to how Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft helped Google become the default search engine on the planet.
They each initially partnered with Google, for the short-term advantage of getting cutting-edge search technology for their individual portal strategies.
That eventually allowed Google to get in front of millions of users in a more cost and time efficient way than they would have otherwise. And it went a long way in helping Google become Google.
Facebook's next moves are an attempt to re-create that opportunity across the web.
In other words, short-term, tactical advantages accruing to the Facebook partner today, translate into long-term, strategic market-share gains for Facebook.
Brings to mind that old adage on how to boil frogs; do it incrementally and/or very slowly.
And the winner this time, presumably, would be the user, who gets a more relevant, distributed, personal portal, that is now even more closely tied in to web services that most matter to them.
It's the kind of win-win-win, that provide meaningful tail-winds to internet glory.
(Update: There's a Part II to this post up here, following the Facebook Platform announcement later this week)
You wrote : " From my perspective, what Facebook could potentially mean for me on the web, would be to make my Facebook page on the service, the primary, truly personalized portal, or daily dashboard, through which I would increasingly interact with the world online. Even more so than my blog. " ----
1) By moving blogs within the walls of social networks, would an outsider have to create a userId to those networks to view your blog ? That would push people away from reading the contents.
2) Would search engines be able to display your blog in a search, if blog is located in a social network platform ?
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Posted by: Piter Leal | Thursday, December 27, 2007 at 12:59 PM