Another Brilliant Facebook Move (Really): Opening to Web
Facebook appears to have taken another small but important step toward becoming the operating system for any application or service that wants to tap into the social graph. Specifically, according to All Facebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's May 2007 opening of its platform to outside developers established a developer ecosystem inside the social network. The January extension moves that model beyond Facebook-hosted applications: developers can run applications on their own sites using Facebook's JavaScript client library.
With 68 million active users reported for the preceding 30 days, Facebook has a meaningful incentive to make its social platform useful wherever developers build, rather than confining those integrations to Facebook pages.
First-order effects
- Developers can deploy Facebook-connected applications on their own websites instead of keeping them strictly inside Facebook, using the new JavaScript client library.
- Facebook expands the practical reach of its platform from an on-site application framework to a web-facing developer layer.
Second-order effects
- Web developers gain a reason to make Facebook compatibility part of their product design, while Facebook gains more places for its platform to be used without operating those sites itself.
- Competing social-web services face pressure to offer similarly usable developer tools if applications can draw value from Facebook's larger active-user base beyond Facebook.com.
Third-order effects
- If developers adopt the external tools, Facebook can become an open-commons chokepoint: applications run independently, but depend on Facebook's platform access and terms.
- The move points toward platform governance becoming interface-neutral, with the strategic contest shifting from owning every application surface to setting the rules for social integrations across them.
The trend: Social networks are evolving from destination sites into developer platforms whose influence extends across independently operated web applications.