7.5 F8—Facebook as a Platform

In May 2007, Facebook followed News Feeds with another initiative that set it head and shoulders above its competition. At a conference called F8 (pronounced “fate”), Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage and announced that he was opening up the screen real estate on Facebook to other application developers. Facebook published a set of application programming interfaces (APIs)Programming hooks, or guidelines, published by firms that tell other programs how to get a service to perform a task such as send or receive data. For example, Amazon.com provides APIs to let developers write their own applications and Websites that can send the firm orders. that specified how programs could be written to run within and interact with Facebook. Now any programmer could write an application that would run inside a user’s profile. Geeks of the world, Facebook’s user base could be yours! Just write something good.

Developers could charge for their wares, offer them for free, and even run ads. And Facebook let developers keep what they made. This was a key distinction; MySpace initially restricted developer revenue on the few products designed to run on their site, at times even blocking some applications. The choice was clear, and developers flocked to Facebook.

To promote the new apps, Facebook would run an Applications area on the site where users could browse offerings. Even better, News Feed was a viral injection that spread the word each time an application was installed. Your best friend just put up a slide show app? Maybe you’ll check it out, too. The predictions of one billion dollars in social network ad spending were geek catnip, and legions of programmers wanted a little bit for themselves. Apps could be cobbled together on the quick, feeds made them spread like wildfire, and the early movers offered adoption rates never before seen by small groups of software developers. People began speaking of the Facebook Economy. Facebook was considered a platform. Some compared it to the next Windows, Zuckerberg the next Gates (hey, they both dropped out of Harvard, right?).

And each application potentially added more value and features to the site without Facebook lifting a finger. The initial event launched with sixty-five developer partners and eighty-five applications. There were some missteps along the way. Some applications were accused of spamming friends with invites to install them. There were also security concerns and apps that violated the intellectual property of other firms (see the “Scrabulous” sidebar below), but Facebook worked to quickly remove errant apps, improve the system, and encourage developers. Just one year in, Facebook had marshaled the efforts of some four hundred thousand developers and entrepreneurs, twenty-four thousand applications had been built for the platform, 140 new apps were being added each day, and 95 percent of Facebook members had installed at least one Facebook application. As Sarah Lacy, author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, put it, “with one masterstroke, Zuck had mobilized all of Silicon Valley to innovate for him.”

With feeds to spread the word, Facebook was starting to look like the first place to go to launch an online innovation. Skip the Web, bring it to Zuckerberg’s site first. Consider iLike: within the first three months, the firm saw installs of its Facebook app explode to seven million, more than doubling the number of users the firm was able to attract through the Web site it introduced the previous year. iLike became so cool that by September, platinum rocker KT Tunstall was debuting tracks through the Facebook service. A programmer named Mark Pincus wrote a Texas hold ’em game at his kitchen table.Jessica Guynn, “A Software Industry @ Facebook,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2007. Today his social gaming firm, Zynga, is a powerhouse, with over three dozen apps, over sixty million users, and more than one hundred million dollars in annual revenue.M. Learmonth and A. Klaasen, “Facebook Apps Will Make More Money Than Facebook in 2009,” Silicon Alley Insider, May 18, 2009. Some of Zynga’s revenues come from apps that run on MySpace or other networks, too. Zynga games include MafiaWars, Vampires, and the wildly successful Farmville, which boasts some twenty times the number of actual farms in the United States. Seth Goldstein, the CEO of SocialMedia, which developed the Food Fight app, claimed that a buffalo wing chain offered the firm eighty thousand dollars to sponsor virtual wings that Facebook users could hurl at their friends.Lindsay Blakely and Michael Copeland. “The Facebook Economy,” Business 2.0, August 23, 2007. Lee Lorenzen, founder of Altura Ventures, an investment firm exclusively targeting firms creating Facebook apps, said, “Facebook is God’s gift to developers. Never has the path from a good idea to millions of users been shorter.”Jessica Guynn, “A Software Industry @ Facebook,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2007.

Figure 7.1

Farmville is just one of the dozens of Facebook apps offered by Zynga, a profitable Facebook app specialist with more than $100 million in revenue.

Some of the folks developing Facebook applications have serious geek cred. Max Levchin, who (along with Peter Theil) founded PayPal, has widely claimed that his widget company, Slide, would be even bigger than his previous firm (for the record, PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002). Legg Mason and Fidelity have each already invested at levels giving the firm a five-hundred-million-dollar valuation.Jessi Hempel and Michael Copeland, “Are These Widgets Worth Half a Billion?” Fortune, March 25, 2008. But is there that much money to be made from selling ads and mining data on SuperPoke? Levchin’s firm is working to craft new advertising measures to track and leverage engagement. Just what are users doing with the applets? With whom? And how might advertisers use these insights to build winning campaigns? Levchin thinks Slide can answer these questions and capture a ton of business along the way.

But legitimate questions remain. Are Facebook apps really a big deal? Just how important will apps be to adding sustained value within Facebook? And how will firms leverage the Facebook framework to extract their own value? A chart from FlowingData showed the top category, Just for Fun, was larger than the next four categories combined. That suggests that a lot of applications are faddish time wasters. Yes, there is experimentation beyond virtual Zombie Bites. Visa has created a small business network on Facebook (Facebook had some eighty thousand small businesses online at the time of Visa’s launch). Educational software firm Blackboard offered an application that will post data to Facebook pages as soon as there are updates to someone’s Blackboard account (new courses, whether assignments or grades have been posted, etc.). We’re still a long way from Facebook as a Windows rival, but F8 helped push Facebook to #1, and it continues to deliver quirky fun (and then some) supplied by thousands of developers off its payroll.