…a few weeks ago, Facebook pulled a MySpace-like maneuver. The site tore down its walls and opened its pages to outside developers. A new tool kit called Facebook Platform
allows any programmer–a bored student or a multimillion-dollar
corporation–to peel back the site’s breastplate, poke around, and
rearrange the innards. None of the nearly 900 (and counting) programs
released so far are particularly life-changing–among the most popular
add-ons are a "Graffiti" program (downloaded by more than 3.3 million
people as of this writing) that lets you doodle other people’s profiles
and an "Honesty Box" that lets your friends say, anonymously, what they
really think of you [TC: uh-oh]. Collectively, though, these programs are hugely
significant. If the site figures out a smart way to deploy these mini
applications, it will be more than just a social network. Facebook will
turn into a do-everything site with the potential to devour the whole
Internet.
Here is the article. I’ve now filled out my profile, and even put a picture on it, with Yana’s aid of course. Since I don’t have the slightest idea what to do with it (will I ever?), I suppose I am not qualified to comment on this interesting hypothesis. By the way there is also a Facebook group for MarginalRevolution, not set up by me I might add.
MR is crack for teh brain! hells ya!
jim – there has almost certainly not been a dropoff in facebook usage among college students. more and more people, however, are making their profiles private in response to the opening of facebook to a wider audience (including employers, etc). in no way is their business plan failing.
But MySpace *doesn’t* have an API. That’s why this is such big news. On MySpace, all you can do is apply a (very ugly) layer of paint to what they’ve built — garish fonts, graphics, audio and video. On Facebook, you can build real applications that actually *do* things.
“Too many horror stories of employers revoking offers after snooping around facebook.”
That’s going to pretty much go away once enough people have had embarrassing Facebook sites. In fact, I think embarrassing Facebook cites are a public good, because it’s unhealthy for society to pick on people for being honest about themselves. People who are dishonest about themselves tend to fuel unhealthy group dynamics that make for too much bad decisionmaking.
On the anonymous feedback feature on Facebook, I think that generates too much cheap talk. I’ve thought of similar ideas for internal corporate anonymous feedback email, and I rejected the idea because I believe that anonymity just generates blather.
It’d be more fun and interesting for Facebook to create a personal prediction market that lets your friends bet play money (“style points” or “ bucks,”) on outcomes in your life.
Facebook could even apply some of Chen and Fine’s work on small-group appraoches to these prediction markets if the markets have small groups of participants, to generate better predictions.
I’m Keith Brown, I came up with this idea myself and I am posting at at approximately 11:15AM Eastern Time, on June 25th, 2007.
Facebook, if you like this, drop me a line.
I don’t know – Marc Andreesen is clearly a technical genius, but I remain unconvinced that this is as significant a shift as he seems to believe it is.
I suspect that most of these new killer Facebook apps will be small, time-wasting, and ultimately discarded dalliances.
“Keith, that was a cool idea. I suppose it can be done with the API. Want to hire me to do it?
”
How much?
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