The Downside

If you’re up-to-date in the tech industry, you’ve surely heard of the new Facebook Platform. It’s already been covered pretty extensively, so I won’t belabor the point except to say that I believe this is a turning point in the evolution of the Internet. It’s a brilliant move by the developers at Facebook. And if you’ve read much of my blog, you know this sort of praise is rare.

I now understand why Facebook didn’t sell to Yahoo for the $1B or $2B pricetags we’ve been hearing about. At the time, I thought they were either fools or arrogant not to sell for such a rich price, but they knew that this Platform was coming. They knew they had something special up their sleeve. Now that I’ve seen the Platform, I realize they would have been fools to sell to Yahoo before releasing it. They’ll surely be worth 5-10 times more in the next year or two, and will pose a real threat to MySpace.

Now that the Platform is public, Facebook has a community of hundreds and soon to be thousands of developers making their site better every day. A new marketplace is going to spring up around Facebook, much the way MySpace ushered in the age of widgets and Everquest popularized the exchange and auction of digital goods. It will give life to companies that create products for them, just like MySpace enabled YouTube to grow exponentially.

It isn’t often a paradigm shift happens overnight, but that’s exactly what the Facebook Platform has done. Most paradigm shifts happen gradually as a phenomenon grows to become dominant (AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, Google, Everquest, World of Warcraft), but this one is happening in the blink of an eye. Don’t blink.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Internet, Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.