Facebook Traction Rising
I THINK THERE is a relationship between MySpace and Facebook. One is sliding down and the other is rising quickly in terms of membership. In short conversations during breaks between sessions at DIT's e-learning week, I was surprised to encounter people in the hallway who had joined Facebook on the heels of a presentation I gave to 45 university educators attending my blogging workshop. They probably pushed Facebook's community above the 30m mark. It's fair to say that the third level lecturers who stopped to compare notes with me about Facebook were not joiners. They wouldn't normally rush out to subscribe to the next big thing so when they signed up to Facebook and connected to me, it meant that they were novice swimmers in a big pond of electronic social networking. While holding onto the side of the pool (grasping their cups of tea), they wanted to know what's next. I recommend they scroll down through the "What's New" section. On first look, they did not view Facebook as another college social network. They wanted to know what to expect with Facebook's network effect. I told them to explore the network in search of people they would trust and the rest would take care of itself. And who to trust? That's all a matter for the visitor to discern from profiles, newsfeeds and rich media attached to people they discover inside Facebook.
During a follow-up e-learning week session, I caught myself drifting off in thought about trust in Facebook and realising that there is a full-blown network economy already established in Facebook. Well-written widgets, when released into the Facebook ecosystem, can generate hundreds of thousands of downloads a day. If your application, written to leverage the Facebook API, is interesting and useful, Facebook's viral effect will get you one million users in a week. This is happening already.
Now, pretend you subtly remove some functionality from your widget six months later, advising people that the full-fledged widget, the one they used frequently, will cost $25 annually. Even if 90% of your users object to their truncated status and remove your widget from their applications, the remaining 10% could offer a steady revenue line for a long time. And you can pull off this sales coup without any major marketing expenses.
I believe the strongest Facebook applications have not launched yet. I believe those applications will invoke some kind of trust metric that leads to special opportunities to buy things at trade prices. I'm sure someone is working on this kind of application right now.
Find me on Facebook:
http://tippinst.facebook.com/profile.php?id=699587348
Twenty Major's Facebook Nightmare
John Naughton -- "Will Murdoch Lose (Face)Book?"
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