Marginal Revolution: Will Facebook take over the world?

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Will Facebook take over the world?

...a few weeks ago, Facebook pulled a MySpace-like maneuver. The site tore down its walls and opened its pages to outside developers. A new tool kit called Facebook Platform allows any programmer—a bored student or a multimillion-dollar corporation—to peel back the site's breastplate, poke around, and rearrange the innards. None of the nearly 900 (and counting) programs released so far are particularly life-changing—among the most popular add-ons are a "Graffiti" program (downloaded by more than 3.3 million people as of this writing) that lets you doodle other people's profiles and an "Honesty Box" that lets your friends say, anonymously, what they really think of you [TC: uh-oh]. Collectively, though, these programs are hugely significant. If the site figures out a smart way to deploy these mini applications, it will be more than just a social network. Facebook will turn into a do-everything site with the potential to devour the whole Internet.

Here is the article. I've now filled out my profile, and even put a picture on it, with Yana's aid of course. Since I don't have the slightest idea what to do with it (will I ever?), I suppose I am not qualified to comment on this interesting hypothesis. By the way there is also a Facebook group for MarginalRevolution, not set up by me I might add.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 24, 2007 at 04:20 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink

Comments

MR is crack for teh brain! hells ya!

Posted by: Nathan at Jun 24, 2007 5:43:02 PM

A year or so ago, I could take my class rosters, search facebook and download pictures of at least two thirds of my students, perhaps three-quarters. This manoeuvre yielded me a cheatsheet for learning students names relatively quickly. This summer, though, I could find no more than a third of my students' pictures this way. Since my students are mostly juniors, with a few seniors, I conclude that there was, a year or two back, a dropoff in freshmen signing up for facebook.

Around that time, facebook opened itself up to people not affiliated with universities, and now is trying to turn itself into a platform. There's nothing like the failure of one's primary business plan to spur invention.

Posted by: jim at Jun 24, 2007 8:57:01 PM

jim - there has almost certainly not been a dropoff in facebook usage among college students. more and more people, however, are making their profiles private in response to the opening of facebook to a wider audience (including employers, etc). in no way is their business plan failing.

Posted by: cyates at Jun 24, 2007 11:53:45 PM

Google releases its APIs also. So does Amazon. The whole web 2.0 world releases APIs for mashups, etc. None of the above companies has taken over the web yet.

Posted by: anonymous at Jun 25, 2007 12:10:27 AM

But MySpace *doesn't* have an API. That's why this is such big news. On MySpace, all you can do is apply a (very ugly) layer of paint to what they've built -- garish fonts, graphics, audio and video. On Facebook, you can build real applications that actually *do* things.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg at Jun 25, 2007 8:34:42 AM

What they need is the feature to make an "work site" version of your facebook and sell job advertisements. After I graduated, I took down all my pictures and sanitized the whole thing. Too many horror stories of employers revoking offers after snooping around facebook.

Posted by: Steve at Jun 25, 2007 9:10:08 AM

"Too many horror stories of employers revoking offers after snooping around facebook."

That's going to pretty much go away once enough people have had embarrassing Facebook sites. In fact, I think embarrassing Facebook cites are a public good, because it's unhealthy for society to pick on people for being honest about themselves. People who are dishonest about themselves tend to fuel unhealthy group dynamics that make for too much bad decisionmaking.

On the anonymous feedback feature on Facebook, I think that generates too much cheap talk. I've thought of similar ideas for internal corporate anonymous feedback email, and I rejected the idea because I believe that anonymity just generates blather.

It'd be more fun and interesting for Facebook to create a personal prediction market that lets your friends bet play money ("style points" or " bucks,") on outcomes in your life.

Facebook could even apply some of Chen and Fine's work on small-group appraoches to these prediction markets if the markets have small groups of participants, to generate better predictions.

I'm Keith Brown, I came up with this idea myself and I am posting at at approximately 11:15AM Eastern Time, on June 25th, 2007.

Facebook, if you like this, drop me a line.

Posted by: Keith at Jun 25, 2007 11:12:04 AM

Interesting article about the social side of Facebook/MySpace from Danah Boyd at http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html, well worth reading.

Posted by: Tim Lundeen at Jun 25, 2007 3:13:05 PM

I don't know - Marc Andreesen is clearly a technical genius, but I remain unconvinced that this is as significant a shift as he seems to believe it is.

I suspect that most of these new killer Facebook apps will be small, time-wasting, and ultimately discarded dalliances.

Posted by: fustercluck at Jun 25, 2007 10:14:53 PM

Keith, that was a cool idea. I suppose it can be done with the API. Want to hire me to do it? ;-)

Posted by: Harald Korneliussen at Jun 26, 2007 2:06:44 AM

"Keith, that was a cool idea. I suppose it can be done with the API. Want to hire me to do it? ;-)"

How much?

Posted by: Keith at Jun 26, 2007 5:47:00 PM

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