Facebook CTO “Very Confident” Facebook and Apple Will Work Together On Ping
At a dinner with New York media last night, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said he is “very confident” Facebook and Apple will figure out a way to work together on Ping, Apple's music social network.
Context & Ripple Effects
The backdrop here is a public falling-out-in-miniature: as Silicon Alley Insider reported on September 21, 2010, Apple and Facebook spent more than a year talking about integrating Facebook into Ping, then Apple launched Ping without Facebook, leaving Apple's music social network to bootstrap its friend-finding without the social graph it reportedly wanted.
Bret Taylor's dinner remarks are an attempt to reopen that door from Facebook's side — notable because Apple has not confirmed any deal, so this is one executive's stated confidence rather than an announced partnership. It also lands on a beat GigaOM flagged earlier this month when arguing Ping's real prize is social commerce: whoever owns the friend graph around purchases sits on valuable data.
First-order effects
- Ping remains live today without native Facebook integration, meaning Apple must either strike terms with Facebook or keep building friend discovery through its own iTunes account base — the immediate decision Taylor is publicly pressuring Apple toward.
- Facebook gains leverage in the negotiation by signaling openness: if Taylor's confidence proves warranted, Facebook gets its identity layer into Apple's commerce surface; if not, nothing has changed for users.
Second-order effects
- A Facebook-Ping tie-up would set pricing norms for social-graph access deals across media and retail — every merchant eyeing the social-commerce angle GigaOM described would face the same question of what Facebook charges or demands for connect rights.
- Apple's alternative path — leaning on its own hundreds-of-millions-strong iTunes accounts as a de facto identity system — would make Ping less a social network than a closed-commerce community, forcing rivals like Amazon's MP3 store and MySpace Music to decide whether to court Facebook themselves.
Third-order effects
- The standoff previews the structural question of who governs interoperability between platform classes: a device-plus-media company and a social-graph owner each holding something the other needs, with users' friend data as the bargaining chip neither wants to give up cheaply.
- If the pattern holds — platforms talking for a year, launching alone, then renegotiating in public — expect social integration to become a standard contract-negotiation theater, with executives' offhand confidence quotes functioning as opening bids.
The trend: Device-and-media platforms and social-graph owners are entering a period of hard-nosed interconnection bargaining, where access to the friend graph is priced like any other strategic input.