Image source: flickr
I’ve recently been poking around in Facebook fairly frequently. It helps that I got a handful of invites, as friends migrated from MySpace to Facebook, and used the email addressbook suckers to contact me. Noah recently posted about Facebook, so I was inspired to add my proverbial two cents on the topic.
Over the last month, I am spending far more time there, than either I ever spent in MySpace or during my first foray into Facebook. The key difference between than and now, is that Facebook opened up their platform for developing widget by third party developers.
I’ll admit that last spring, I figured that Facebook was a niche social community for college students, which had passed its height of relevance. After it started opening its doors to high schools and then to anybody, I thought that the site was ruining its brand, alienating its power user base, and was headed to the social networking graveyard, right next to Friendster.
I was completely caught off guard, when they opened up their platform to let anyone release apps and widgets. That announcement was a game changing move and immediately drew my attention. It was especially well timed, as MySpace was being criticized for being a closed system, as seen in their blocking of Photobucket, the third party image / video service, from their pages just before they bought the company.
A year ago, I first ventured into Facebook, after chatting with a cousin who was in still an undergrad. Using an old grad school email account, I made a profile with the least amount of information they allowed. I found her profile listing 700+ friends, which was a little overwhelming. All I saw as I clicked around, was a lot of college kids and not much else, so I moved on to other concerns. My experience in MySpace was basically the same. I logged on just enough to see what it was about and to get to some walled content, like the Tracey Thorn page and blog, when her new record was coming out. But mostly, it just looked like a competition to make the most number of friends, which seemed like a lot of work. Basically there was little reason for me to go back to either site, after signing up for a profile.
Now with Facebook, there are the reasons to go back. I lost a couple of evenings playing Q-Bert in the retro-arcade application. The apps give me a reason to regularly return to the site, whether it is to see the cities friends have travelled to or getting your friends to compete with each other. The open platform is an easy way for developers to access a wired pool of users. It’s a great example of the gift economy at work.
Of course, in the end, the measure of success between the sites will probably come down to money. Just because I love free apps doesn’t mean that Facebook will ultimately be more profitable than MySpace or some other social networking site. It will be interesting to see who can monetize their user base more effectively, just as Andy Chen recently queried. Until then, I’ll be playing Centipede and wishing I had a track ball.
