Speculation: Facebook adding Friend Lists; implications for Top Friends, LinkedIn?
We knew it would happen, we just didn't know it might happen this soon. — I just received a tip from top application developer Trey Philips that Facebook has added two new undocumented functions …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after Facebook opened its platform to outside developers, developer Trey Philips has tipped Inside Facebook that undocumented Friend Lists functions have appeared in Facebook's code — unconfirmed ahead of any official announcement, but spotted from inside the developer community the new platform just created.
Why it matters: Friend Lists would be Facebook building natively what third-party apps like Top Friends already offer, raising the question every developer on the young platform now faces — which features does the host absorb next? The same rumor carries a competitive edge toward LinkedIn, on speculation that grouped friends could reach professional-networking use cases.
First-order effects
- Top Friends, one of the early hit applications, faces being absorbed into core Facebook functionality before the platform ecosystem has even matured.
- Facebook gains finer-grained sharing controls, addressing the flat-friend-list privacy structure that has defined the site so far.
Second-order effects
- Developers who rushed in after the platform opened in August 2007 must now price in host absorption when choosing what to build, pushing them toward features adjacent to — not overlapping with — Facebook's own roadmap.
- If Friend Lists group colleagues separately from personal contacts, LinkedIn's differentiation as the organized professional graph comes under direct pressure, though that reading remains speculative.
Third-order effects
- A pattern where platform hosts convert their most popular third-party applications into native features would reshape the app economy around the platform owner's discretion, forcing developers to treat core-feature overlap as an existential risk rather than a niche concern.
The trend: Social platforms are moving from open ecosystems toward native absorption of their most popular third-party features, with Friend Lists as an early test of how much overlap developers must tolerate.