Facebook Launches Facebook Platform; They are the Anti-MySpace
Facebook is holding a massive press/developer event today in San Francisco to officially launch Facebook Platform. 750 or so people are here. — A number of third party applications will also be announced, including Microsoft …
Context & Ripple Effects
With no earlier stories in our corpus leading into it, today stands on its own: Facebook has convened roughly 750 developers in San Francisco to launch Facebook Platform, opening its network to third-party applications, and it has chosen to frame the move explicitly as competitive positioning — the confirmed 'Anti-MySpace' branding casts rival MySpace as the closed alternative.
The pickup pattern is unusually broad for a developer event: alongside blog-native outlets like Mashable, Webware, CenterNetworks and Splashcast, Business Week and Fortune both ran the story, signaling that mainstream business press reads platform openness as a strategic shift rather than a product update. Launch-day applications include one from Microsoft, the nonprofit-oriented Causes app, and a Facebook video feature that Mashable frames as a direct challenge to YouTube.
First-order effects
- Developers gain immediate programmatic access to Facebook's user base — Microsoft is among the launch partners, and apps such as Causes and the newly launched Facebook video feature go live inside the network on day one.
- Facebook converts its previously self-contained social network into an application host, changing what a Facebook profile page can do overnight for every user and every approved developer.
Second-order effects
- MySpace, positioned as the closed foil in Facebook's messaging, comes under pressure to open a comparable developer platform or watch third-party builder energy concentrate on its smaller rival.
- Incumbents in adjacent categories — most immediately video sharing, given Mashable's 'YouTube Beware' framing — face in-network competitors that distribute through social connections rather than standalone traffic.
Third-order effects
- If the model holds, social networks compete less on features and more on the size and rules of their developer ecosystems, making platform-governance decisions — which apps a host admits and how — a core strategic lever.
- A successful open-platform play by the #2 social network would push the whole category toward platformization, where the network's value is measured by third-party activity built on top of it.
The trend: Social networking is pivoting from closed destination sites to open application platforms, with each major network's developer-access policy becoming its primary competitive weapon.