It's the Facebook Platform's 3 Month Anniversary
Today marks the 3-month anniversary of the Facebook Platform since it launched May 24 at F8 in San Francisco. Suffice it to say, the pace of innovation surrounding the Facebook Platform so far is faster than that for any platform ever before.
Context & Ripple Effects
Three months after Facebook opened itself to outside developers at F8 in May, Inside Facebook marks the anniversary by calling it the fastest pace of innovation any platform has ever seen. That judgment extends the arc started when Marc Andreessen's analysis three weeks in framed the launch as a structural break with how social networks had treated developers before.
The framing that stuck from launch day — Facebook as 'the anti-MySpace' for welcoming rather than walling off third-party apps — is now being tested at scale: whatever the platform's rules allow or restrict lands on thousands of dependent developers at once.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers who built on the platform since May now hold real user reach inside Facebook's social graph, making the app directory and notification channels the primary distribution battleground.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks face pressure to answer the anti-MySpace positioning: a walled network competing against one that hands developers free distribution risks losing both apps and the engagement they generate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, control of the access layer — who may build on a social graph and under what terms — becomes the decisive competitive asset in social software, concentrating power in the platform owner rather than the app makers.
The trend: Social networking is consolidating around platform-owner-controlled distribution, with Facebook's open API setting the terms other networks must match or cede the developer ecosystem.