Facebook: The social Web utility company
The suspense is nearly over. In about an hour, Facebook will lift the veil on its plans to turn its social networking site into a platform that its makers hope becomes a pervasive ecosystem. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls this latest interation …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook is holding its f8 developer event in San Francisco today, officially launching Facebook Platform and opening its network to third-party applications, including one from Microsoft. The story has drawn an unusual breadth of pickup for a product launch — Fortune ran an exclusive under 'Facebook's new face' and 'a plan to hook up the world', TechCrunch framed it as 'the Anti-MySpace', and GigaOM cast the ambition as a 'Social OS'.
The move lands just days after Facebook opened its Pages to fuel growth (May 21), and follows two days of rumors that the company was preparing a widget deal and wrestling with how to recapture ad revenue lost to widgets. Zuckerberg's framing — a step toward becoming a pervasive social Web utility — positions the platform not as a feature drop but as infrastructure other services build on.
First-order effects
- Thousands of outside developers gain programmatic access to Facebook's user base and profile pages, turning the site from a closed destination into an app distribution channel overnight.
- Microsoft's decision to ship one of the launch-day applications gives the platform immediate large-company validation and puts a major software vendor inside a rival consumer network.
Second-order effects
- MySpace, explicitly cast as the closed counter-model by the 'Anti-MySpace' framing, faces pressure to answer with its own developer openness strategy rather than compete on features alone.
- Standalone widget makers — whose off-network embeds were already siphoning ad revenue from social networks, per the pre-launch rumors — must now choose between independent distribution and building inside Facebook's governed ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition among social networks shifts from owning users to courting developers, making the quality of APIs, terms, and distribution the real battleground — a structural change TechCrunch's 'Social OS' label captures.
- The 'social Web utility' framing points toward networks arguing over whether social functionality is a destination or a substrate others build on — a governance question about who controls identity and data flows across the open Web.
The trend: Consumer web companies are converting closed destination sites into developer platforms, with control of the social graph emerging as the next layer of infrastructure to fight over.