Breaking: Facebook Announces Facebook Platform for Mobile; Facebook for Blackberry
This just in - today at CTIA, Facebook is announcing Facebook Platform for Mobile. With Facebook Platform for Mobile, current Facebook Platform developers will be able to extend their applications to work on mobile phones and devices as well.
Context & Ripple Effects
Five months after launching Facebook Platform in May 2007 — the move TechCrunch framed as positioning Facebook against MySpace — the company is taking its developer ecosystem off the desktop. Early analysis of the platform's first weeks (blog.pmarca.com) treated it as a web phenomenon; today's CTIA announcement extends it to phones, alongside a dedicated Facebook for BlackBerry application.
The mobile push lands amid a stretch of defensive moves: Facebook opened its Application Directory to non-logged-in visitors and search indexing on October 21, days after commentators accused it of drifting into a private walled garden, and one week after agreeing with New York AG Andrew Cuomo to independent compliance monitoring on safety complaints.
First-order effects
- Existing Facebook Platform developers can now extend their applications to mobile devices without building separate mobile products, immediately widening their distribution beyond the browser.
- BlackBerry users get a native Facebook application, giving Research In Motion's installed base direct access rather than a generic mobile-web experience.
Second-order effects
- Rival social networks face pressure to match developer access on handsets or watch third-party apps consolidate around Facebook across both desktop and mobile.
- Device makers and carriers gain a new class of data-hungry social applications to bundle, shifting leverage toward whoever hosts the platform developers build on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking competition moves from website features to platform reach across devices — with the walled-garden critique following Facebook onto the phone.
The trend: Social platforms are extending developer ecosystems from the web browser onto mobile handsets, making device reach the next battleground after web distribution.