Sunday, November 25, 2007

the more control you give away - the more value you get back

Quoting Hinchcliffe

"Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately, you know that Facebook is presently the industry darling in social networking, having largely pushed MySpace off the industry's stage, as it seems to offer a more compelling model for social interaction to users overall.  Just as importantly, Facebook also lets any other company that wants to join in party do so by building 3rd party Facebook applications, of which over 7,100 now exist, making Facebook increasingly rich in functionality and content by leveraging the creative capacity at the edge of the Web.  In the Web 2.0 era (and in all computing eras before), the central truism is that a platform beats an application every time. This applies here with a vengeance and MySpace and other social networking sites have suddenly rushed to embrace openness and 3rd party widgets and gadgets to such an extent that MySpace has thrown in with Google on OpenSocial.

So the damage is done and in the fickle world of online social networking, Facebook currently has the upper hand.  This demonstrates yet again a powerful but counterintuitive aspect of networked software: the more control you give away, the more value you can get back."

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Bo!

Adopting open API has been a great move for Facebook, I think they are doing a good job...but of course the new Google OpenSocial is going to be a game changer

It's actually interesting to see how for example other networks that before where quite 'closed', like Linkedin, are now embracing this new 'cross-platform' open API concept

It will be nice to see how the scenario will evolve,

Andrea
http://www.andreavascellari.com/blog/
http://media.vascellari.com/

BoHarald said...

Who came first with the open API? Salesforce.com was early.

Unknown said...

Well yes, salesforce.com if we look at CRMs, but many have been the apps, networks and platforms that experimented open APIs in 'early days'...of course Facebook hasn't been the first but I thought it was an interesting the move they made if we look at the state of the art of many networks at that time

Next week I will release on my media channel (http://media.vascellari.com) an episode that I recently recorded with Tim O'Reilly in which we talk also about this open API era and about the new OpenSocial for example

here's the feed if you want to stay tuned http://feeds.feedburner.com/VMC

It was nice to meet you this summer during the CKIR open innovation workshop in Helsinki, it's a shame we didn't have time to talk more

Let's hope to meet again soon, I'm always following you via rss here on your blog

Hope you had a nice Finnish Independence Day!

Andrea

BoHarald said...

Great stuff - added your blog to my links.
Bo

Unknown said...

Thanks Bo,

I'm happy you like my media channel, if you fancy, you are more than welcome to join the conversation,

and this is my blog http://www.andreavascellari.com/blog/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/vascellari

Have a nice weekend Bo, and keep up the great work here on your blog!

Andrea

http://www.meebo.com/rooms