third part of the facebook saga

As facebook moved on to its later years, many new problems and expansions occurred. Now that the user base was substantial and the company had more money for research and development Zuckerberg’s farfetched dreams seemed to come closer to reality. He wanted to create a “platform” for facebook which would allow developers to create their own software for the website. Mark was keen on making sure the platform was free to developers, letting them earn their own profits and use facebook to redirect to their own websites. Facebook would only earn the revenue on banner ads placed on the side of applications.

“Creating a platform enables a software company to become the nexus of an ecosystem of partners that are dependent on its product” (218).

 This is similar to what Microsoft created with the Windows operating system, creating an ecosystem for other companies to thrive in, making Microsoft’s product very stable and of high demand. They created a global monopoly using Windows. Facebook was trying to create a similar environment for their website. Now instead of facebook devoting all its resources to improving the available applications and features, external companies will create them and in a natural balance of supply and demand will show the useful applications to be successful. Users will be able to decide what they want to use and what they don’t want on their page, making it very customizable.

                “We want an ecosystem which doesn’t favor our own applications” (220)

                Mark wanted this “Ecosystem” to be so natural that he did not want his own facebook applications to be favored by the website. He wanted an even playing ground to create fair competition for developers. Features were even removed from the photo application because they were not available to the rest of the applications on the platform.

“Games are now the most successful type of application on facebook, drawing in phenomenal numbers of players” (231).

After the platform was activated and put online they proved to be extremely successful. Millions of users began to join the apps and many companies were successful just working off of facebook. Games became a social activity allowing competition and gameplay between users.

Eventually facebook became so big that there were a substantial number of users not from the United States.  Facebook was loosing a lot of revenue from these users because they had to update their servers to handle the data load but could not make revenue from them because the advertising was mainly based for consumers in the United States. Now facebook began to take offers for global advertising, and eventually after a lot of negotiating between Microsoft and Google, Microsoft got the offer.

Facebook also created something called Facebookconnect which allowed websites to use a facebook login on their websites and access facebook’s services. Now that facebook was being accessible by many companies other than Mark Zuckerberg’s facebook, there are a lot less limits on who can see our information. Facebook has created an online identity for many of its users, and many people are at risk for loosing private information. What made facebook great was that we could share whatever we wanted with the people we wanted to see it but slowly we have to be more and more concerned with what is posted on our profiles, fearing corporations trying to collect personal information. Time will only tell if facebook will protect their users privacy or make it more accessible to the world.