Facebook for the Enterprise = Facebook
Guest post: AccMan blogger and deep thinker on enterprise software Dennis Howlett, offers his take on Facebook as an enterprise, not just consumer, play and patches together opinions from the Enterprise Irregulars: — Facebook is a phenomenon that's capturing enterprisey attention.
Context & Ripple Effects
This guest post from AccMan's Dennis Howlett, aggregating opinion from the Enterprise Irregulars blogger group, lands weeks after Facebook opened its API to third-party developers and launched the F8 platform for third-party apps — the moves that turned a consumer network into something developers could build on.
Why it matters in June 2007: enterprise software bloggers, not just VCs, are now treating Facebook as infrastructure. The commentary also flags a competitive edge — Facebook's growth is read as a potential incursion into LinkedIn's professional networking territory, and at least one longtime user reports daily checking, growing friend lists, and multiple installed apps following F8.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn faces direct pressure: if Facebook's graph doubles as a professional network, LinkedIn's paid-recruiting moat gets tested at the profile level rather than the feature level.
Second-order effects
- Third-party developers now have a distribution channel inside a site employees already check daily, so work-oriented apps become the natural next wave after F8's consumer widgets; rival social networks face pressure to respond with open APIs of their own, though that scramble remains unconfirmed rather than observed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the boundary between consumer social networks and enterprise collaboration software erodes — a consumer platform with a developer ecosystem becomes a de facto intranet layer that traditional enterprise software vendors have no answer for.
The trend: Consumer social platforms with open developer platforms are beginning to absorb workplace collaboration, pulling enterprise software vendors onto terrain they don't control.