Tonight I was discussing with a friend about the big things of 2007, and among them is the incredible success of Facebook. Based on the recent MS investment in Facebook, the value of the company could be something like 15 billion. What made Facebook so big? Social networks have popped up like mushrooms in 2007, but Facebook was kind of unique. Here is what it came out of our discussion:
Facebook is an open platform: for the way I see it, Facebook could be compared to a middleware. The idea behind it is building a social network that can be used for a moltitude of applications. Facebook, on its own, offers a limited set of fuctionalities; what makes Facebook great is the total extensibility and the possibility that third-party applications have to take advantage of the data collected by the social network.
Facebook provides constant and real-time updates about your social network: being online is a way of living. People want to be reachable everytime; people want to interact with each other in a quick way. This is what Facebook is all about. All applications available on Facebook are basically interaction tools providing real-time feedback to its users. Users like this! Thanks to these tools dveloped by third parties, Facebook collects a lot of useful information about users behavior.
Facebook has built an entire ecosystem by offering to all developers three big things: an application framework allowing complex application development, a huge amount of useful data (the social network) and a lot of potential users. These three components contributed to the birth of so many applications, giving a great value to the company.
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