Facebook Ecosystem
April 10th, 2008 by shinzu
I first joined Facebook a while back to see what all the hype was about. I was thinking ‘oh.. another Myspace or Friendster.’ When joining I amazingly actually found it useful to keep track of my friends on what they were doing. To me it is a social network that actually works.
The day that really intrigued me was when Facebook opened up its api (umm.. programming interfaces) so other people could create applications. Basically you can create some application, and run it in Facebook itself. To me, this started the creation of a broader Facebook ecosystem.
To me, an ecosystem is something that is dynamic, lively, and changing. People have added applications like ‘Friends for Sale’ where you can buy your friends, ‘Superpoke’ which is a variation of poking (getting someone’s attention), and etc. The big question here is if this ecosystem can make money.
Traditional business models usually make money by offering some value-added services or item someone needs. For example, if I get car work done, I pay for it because an actual service was done to my car.. If I need anti-virus software, I can buy a subscription license for a year. These things more or less are tangible services.
Web business models also do exist, namely one of the biggest one being Google and advertising. Google acts as an advertisement broker where they can take a cut in exchange for deliverance of the ads based on searching or the ads on your site.
But Facebook to me is classified in a strange boat. People seem to be making a lot of money off applications that don’t apparently seem to have any true “value-added” services. For example, super-poking your friends, or biting your friends to become vampires don’t seem to have any intrinsic value to me.
Or are we in a new era where you don’t have to deliver value-added services to make money where the money is in the ecosystem itself.
All I know is if you want to make money.. you should be paying attention to Facebook to see if some of the experimental business models are going to pan out.