Second Thoughts

Inspired by R/WW’s post on Yahoo and how they should open up their platform for 3rd party developers, I’d like to share a few of my own opinions on this trend.

After Facebook opened up their platform, it seems like the new holy grail of the internet is to become the next platform. After a few years with deportalization and widgetization as the trend, it seems like platformization is the new direction. Platforms do have an advantage over old school portals in that they may provide services and content from 3rd parties - not necessarily controlling and owing everything they users can access. But, I still think this just the modern day equivalent of the good old portal. We already have a platform, it is called the World Wide Web, and there are lots of nice protocols that enable us to create cooperating systems on the world’s biggest desktop. We don’t need to create new platform silos on top of the application silos that already exist.

The main reason I am not "all in" on Facebook, is that it is still a closed social network (even though everyone can join).  Developers can create applications that work on Facebook, but to me this is a bit analogous to Microsoft - everyone can develop applications that work on Windows and people who have Windows PCs can use the applications on Windows (i.e.Facebook).

I think there is a need to help people manage all the fragmented services that exist today. The growth of Facebook is proof of this. They have introduced many fun and social applications to people that never read TechCrunch. And they have provided several of their application providers with new users that would never have heard of them otherwise.

After the explosion in innovation for the collaborative web, there are so many new services around, each with their unique features and benefits. (OK, not all of them.) We should find a way of organizing them, but I don’t think we should put them into new social silos. I believe more in the approach of Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle which basically work as open placeholders for other applications content and their basic features,  than in forcing an application to work within a closed social network on top it’s own community.

Facebook will become a great platform for conspicuous internet applications and work very well as a social network. They’ve definitely staked out a very strong and attractive position in this market.

But as a platform for  the collaborative web - I think we should focus on interconnecting what already exist on the distributed desktop via open APIs and work towards greater cooperation between the services. We don’t really need a Facebook or a Yahoo platform to do this - we just need to open up and work together, independently and synergistically on the World Wide Web.