The Facebook platform

Facebook has opened up an extensive API to allow outside programmers to piggyback apps on their platform. This means that you could write a widget and have it adopted by millions of FB users in a matter of days (as has happened to iLike and others).
Note: make sure your servers are ready!

Developers’ page: http://developers.facebook.com/get_started.php

Here are some of the more popular apps that have already been developed:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/06/04/this-weeks-top-25-hottest-facebook-apps/

Marc Andreesen has a great analysis of the significance of all this here:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html - basic point being that the former Web application has become a platform - in a way that many sites could and should have done, but haven't. And a platform beats an application every time (e.g. dedicated word processors vs. flexible desktop computers - we all know who won that one).

So what can brands do to leverage this? Well - what would you do if you had an application that millions of people were using every day, in a social-network context? You've got access to the Facebook API, so you can see your users’ profile, friend, photo, and event data. Hint: no spamming!

David Sacks has a great article on how social-network-as-platform transforms users’ ways of finding what they want on the web:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/31/the-new-portals-its-the-bread-not-the-peanut-butter/

Sacks notes:

"Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask."
And he goes so far as to say "Much of what we know as “Web 2.0″ will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook." Bold prediction - we'll see!

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