Deconstructing Facebook
Have you noticed a massive surge on Facebook lately, since it opened itself up to everyone outside of .edu? I have — and I bet that other social networks are now scrambling to respond, especially in light of Facebook's opening of its API.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has spent the past month converting itself from a campus network into an open platform: since dropping the .edu requirement and confirming the opening of its API to third-party developers, the site reports a visible surge in activity. The pickup is broad enough that CNET News.com ran two separate pieces on or about this date cataloging the resulting 'feeding frenzy' of apps built to eat workdays.
The developer side is already real — Facebook hosted a New York Developer Meetup drawing a crowd of eager app builders, and entrepreneurs are racing to ship ahead of launches. What remains unconfirmed is the competitive response: claims that rival social networks are scrambling to match the open API are circulating as expectation, not announcement, just as unverified reports of emergency fundraising and dismissed server-shortage rumors circle the platform's rapid growth.
First-order effects
- Thousands of independent developers and entrepreneurs now have programmatic distribution inside Facebook's social graph, and their apps land directly in front of users who joined for school or work connections.
- Facebook's own operations absorb the strain of simultaneous membership expansion and API traffic — pressure the company publicly denies, contradicting reported server-space shortages.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks face pressure to answer with their own developer platforms — an expected scramble that, per available reporting, remains anticipated rather than executed — while MySpace and Facebook simultaneously reassure millions of subscribers that designated friends are the only readers of private postings.
- Privacy becomes the battleground where openness gets tested: an emotional-distress suit now probing MySpace and Facebook's privacy limits gives regulators and users a concrete case for how much sharing platforms can invite before liability follows.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networks stop competing primarily on member counts and start competing on developer ecosystems — the platform with the most third-party apps sets the terms of user attention, echoing what economists call the synthetic supply problem of unlimited apps chasing finite user hours.
- The same shift forces an unresolved question into the industry's structure: whether an open API and private profiles can coexist, a tension the current lawsuit and the platforms' friend-only assurances will test well before any regulator does.
The trend: Social networking is pivoting from walled-garden destination to application platform, with Facebook's API opening forcing every rival to decide whether to build an ecosystem or cede the developer layer.