Several weeks ago, Facebook - the fast-growing social networking site - launched something it called F8, also known as the Facebook Platform. On the surface, it seemed to be just a way of letting other Web-based services piggyback on Facebook, and pitch their wares to the site's 12 million or so users.
Many Web-based services, including Google Maps and the photo-sharing site Flickr, have what is called an "open API" (application programming interface). That makes it easy for other software companies to create applications that share data with their services, such as the Google Maps "mashups" that plot crime statistics based on geographical location, among others.
Even at the May 24th F8 launch, however, it was obvious that Facebook was trying to do something much more ambitious.
In effect, the company is doing its best to transform Facebook from just another Web-based service into a platform for other services, in the same way that Windows isn't just software but also a platform for software from other companies.
Some see the move by 23-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his team as being a smart strategic decision for the young company. And it has certainly paid off for some of the early adopters: One, a music service called iLike, has grown from 1,200 users to six million in two weeks, with about three million of those coming from Facebook's Platform.
Marc Andreesen, who himself was a twentysomething entrepreneur when he started Netscape Communications in the mid-1990s, called the F8 launch "one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade," and said it marked a "dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry."
On his blog, Mr. Andreesen - who now runs a social software company called Ning - said he believes Facebook's Platform was a wise move for several reasons. One of the main ones is that "in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win." One example of that, Mr. Andreesen says, is the triumph of the expandable and adaptable PC over the early Wang word processor (a dedicated device without expandability).
In the same way, the almost infinite adaptability of the Web and Web-based services made static "walled gardens" such as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online obsolete. "No single closed service, no matter how good, and no matter how big, could compete with the diversity of thousands and then millions of websites," Mr. Andreesen says on his blog.
One of the biggest reasons Facebook Platform has been so successful for services such as iLike, even in just the short time it has been available, is the viral nature of the social network that Facebook has become. Whenever a user adds a new application, their friends see that fact in their news feed, and are thereby subtly encouraged to sign up for it as well.
In less than three weeks, there are almost a dozen Facebook applications that have more than a million users, and the top five - including iLike, Top Friends, Horoscopes, Fortune Cookie and Graffiti - have more than two million. Top Friends, which is currently the leader, has almost four million.
The launch has been good for Facebook as well: According to one estimate at the website Inside Facebook, traffic in terms of page views has grown by about 30 per cent since the launch.
Facebook isn't the only social network that is trying to become a platform, but it seems to be further ahead than its main competitor, MySpace. Although the latter is larger in terms of users (with about 45 million), it isn't as sophisticated, and it has had a fractious relationship with some third-party services, including Photobucket (which MySpace ultimately acquired).
Mr. Andreesen does note that the kind of rapid growth companies are seeing as a result of being on Facebook Platform - iLike says more than 300,000 new users are signing up every day - can have a downside as well, since very few small companies are prepared for that kind of growth overnight.
Just a day or so after its Facebook service launched, in fact, iLike's chief executive officer - who started the company with his twin brother - sent out an e-mail begging anyone with spare server space to call the company, which had doubled the number of servers it was running not just once or twice, but more than five times.
Of course, rapid growth, thanks to the Facebook "network effect," is a nice problem for a company to have. And from the way the F8 Platform is growing, more and more companies are likely to get a crack at sharing that problem.
