READ, SET...
Well, the race to out-facebook Facebook I talked about a few days ago, has begun.
Incumbent social networks are starting to emulate Facebook by articulating their intentions to "open up their networks", and pursue some form of a platform strategy.
Techmeme is abuzz with news that LinkedIn, which focuses on business-based social networks, is planning just such a move. The company happens to share investors with Facebook, interestingly enough.
The whole thing reminds me of the 1963 classic movie, represented by the adjacent poster.
And there's another entrant in the race, as expected.
Just as Robert Scoble intimated a couple of days ago, Plaxo is rolling out it's new, web-based, strategy, to also emulate Facebook. Again, here's how Robert describes the roll-out:
"It’s now a Web service.
In fact you can use Plaxo without loading any software. All to manage your contacts.
For someone like me that still has most of my contacts in Outlook the new Plaxo is a godsend. It lets me move my contacts, my calendar data, and other things out of Outlook and onto other platforms.
You can move things over to Google, AIM, Yahoo, the Mac’s iCal, and a variety of other applications and cell phones...
...On the other hand it now is encroaching on social networking apps like LinkedIn and Facebook."
A lot of the features are on the come, with the current release being a pretty early beta. But they too have started down the Facebook road.
The one I'm really waiting for is the current big-daddy of social networks, MySpace, to do an about-face and start to down the Facebook platform road. They were going full-speed in the opposite direction, when Facebook showed it's hand by going the other way.
Before it's all said and done, it'll be a full-fledged, mad-rush by dozens of companies trying to do this "social network platform" thing.
Get ready to import and export your contacts and "friends" lists all over the place, into and out of all kinds of social networks, up and down your "social graph".
It's going to exhausting but fun. And hopefully profitable.
I really don't understand what Facebook means by 'social networking platform.'
Do they just mean one can take Facebook data (using their published APIs) into an external application and display it in a mashup (e.g., geomapping of my social network of friends)? This is somewhat akin to a real-time export/import (a synced up export/import).
Or, do they mean I can get Facebook users to use an external application using APIs (a la software developers getting their applications to run on a Windows desktop) from within Facebook, thus enhancing Facebook functionality?
To my mind the latter is more powerful. I am not sure if Facebook lets you do this. Any insights?
Posted by: Kiran Bettadapur | Tuesday, July 03, 2007 at 05:22 PM