Memo to OpenSocial: It’s about distribution, stupid! Jesse · Comments (17) · November 7th, 2007
With the launch of Google's OpenSocial project last week and the subsequent announcement that MySpace will be one of the participating social networks the developer community on Facebook and the technology blogosphere is wondering what this means for Facebook's platform strategy. The short answer: not much. Why? Because it's not about users per se, it's about distribution.
Note: This was cross-posted to the Adonomics blog.
The Hype Machine
Talking heads love narratives. After MySpace announced their partnership the narrative became "the young and arrogant Facebook was shown up by the experienced and prudent Google, who in one fell swoop obsoleted their whole platform strategy." Michael Arrington asked if this were "checkmate" for Google. Others have been asking whether or not Facebook should just give up and join OpenSocial itself.
Hitwise even published a graph showing the total size of all the OpenSocial partners vs. Facebook. Yikes! That sure looks bad for Facebook.
But like most media narratives the story turns out to be more subtle.
The Value of the Facebook Platform
These subtleties first appear when you consider the value application developers get from Facebook. Nothing in this world is free, including developing applications for Facebook platform. In exchange for agreeing to dress your application in the Facebook blues they are offering you, the developer, two things:
- Lower cost of acquisition per user
- An unparalleled distribution mechanism
The cost of acquiring a user on Facebook is orders of magnitude cheaper on Facebook than on the web at large. Facebook effectively offers a single sign-on solution with their API, on top of which it only takes one click for a user to add an application to their profile.
OpenSocial clears this hurdle, too. If I'm in MySpace an OpenSocial widget will use MySpace's login system to verify whatever it needs to verify. Ok, so I can install OpenSocial widgets in one click. Once a user has decided they want to add my widget the barrier to entry is minimal.
Distribution, however, deals with the step before this. How do I get users information about my application to begin with?
It's About Distribution, Stupid!
Last September something remarkable happened: Facebook launched the newsfeed and mini-feed. Although most people didn't realize it at the time this effectively "activated" the social network underlying Facebook, making it possible for information to flow efficiently through the connections in that network. Information that I used to have to seek out now came to me without any effort on my part!
This made it possible for Facebook to become a distribution engine. Through the newsfeed Facebook could, in theory, distribute anything: advertisements, my friends' activity, and even software.
Heck, Facebook could partner with local governments to send out public health announcements to local Facebook users. This is powerful stuff and it's what drove the Facebook-made photos and events applications to be larger than Flickr and Evite, respectively.
So when Facebook opened up the platform plenty of people knew it would be possible for them to achieve the same kind of success. iLike saw three million users add their application in the first two weeks. Even now, three and a half months later, it's possible to get a million users in less than a month.
You might not hear stories like iLike's any more but that doesn't mean the Facebook platform isn't growing. The number of application installs across all of Facebook has been remarkably consistent since the launch of the platform growing at a rate of about 1.5% or 2.96 million installs per day.
That's right. Every day almost 3 million people click that big blue "Install" button and don't remove the application. And this growth shows absolutely no sign of slowing.
OpenSocial vs. Facebook
To quote Dave McClure, "open is not better, better is better!"
Ignoring questions of the quality of the users, OpenSocial's incorporation of MySpace appears to give them the edge. MySpace, after all, has 200 million users and Facebook has 50 million. But the size of the potential userbase doesn't matter nearly as much as the ability for an application developer to activate that userbase.
Peter Chane, the Group Product Manager at Google for OpenSocial, has stated that OpenSocial will have some components of Facebook's distribution system (newsfeed/mini-feed) but not others (notifications/requests).
Whether the OpenSocial model can surpass Facebook-level distribution is the key question. It's not about how many users are using the social networks on OpenSocial — it's not even clear that there's going to be any real interaction between users on different networks, anyhow. It's not about whether OpenSocial is more or less "open" than Facebook. It's about whether developers can build high-quality applications (not just widgets) using the OpenSocial technology and distribute them efficiently through the social graph.
There are all sorts of unknowns even though OpenSocial is a week old. How does OpenSocial’s feed-based system compare to Facebook’s newsfeed? How does the quality of the social graph wired up with OpenSocial compare to Facebook’s? What impact do these factors have on the efficiency of distribution?
In Closing…
The point is this: don't be blinded by the big numbers of MySpace. Until OpenSocial shows it can activate those users in a way that is more viral than Facebook it's an unproven technology, even ignoring the fact that as of this post OpenSocial doesn't provide any meaningful way to interact between containers. If you're on MySpace you're not going to be able to switch to another social network and take your MySpace data with you.
That it's been a week since Google launched OpenSocial and the only story about iLike is not that they're on track to get another windfall of users via OpenSocial, but that their Ning application has been hacked makes be believe Facebook's king can more than meet the threat from Google's attack.
[…] With the launch of Google’s OpenSocial project last week and the subsequent announcement that MySpace will be one of the participating social networks the developer community on Facebook and the technology blogosphere is wondering what this means for Facebook’s platform strategy. The short answer: not much. Why? Because it’s not about users per se, it’s about distribution.Note: This was cross-posted to 20bits.com […]
Excellent analysis. I agree completely that it’s the incredibly low cost of installing apps (in terms of time) on facebook that makes it so viral. you don’t hunt for apps on facebook, you stumble upon them, and then you install them with just a few total clicks. without both having something as central to the user experience as the news-feed for spreading word of new apps and without the extreme ease of installing an app once you come across it, no one will be able to compete with facebook for providing eyeballs for your work.
it will be interesting to quantitatively track the virality apps experience on opensocial compared to facebook as opensocial gets going.
I already have facebook notifications/requests blindness. I never check it because its always someone asking me to use some lame application.
Most of facebooks good points, differentiation, and uniqueness are fast disappearing.
Hone,
Lots of people say this, but the numbers don’t lie. Facebook is actually growing faster than the application space, which itself is growing rapidly! Just look at the graph I included.
Excellent analysis. Google has put their brand behind OpenSocial and that gives them a lot of leverage. They have a ways to go in building the feature-set they want in OpenSocial to make it truly competitive. I think OpenSocial is a game changer, but it ultimately depends on how far they can take it to unify the social network data: http://fishtrain.com/2007/11/01/opensocial-social-unification/
I guess it’s typical to see someone equating Facebook with OpenSocial, even though OpenSocial is actually an integration of all things social — meaning, and for the most-part — the entire Internet. It’s a platform of tools provided to anyone, including Facebook (who woulda thunk it?).
The entire Internet itself is a social network — yet, it’s ironic that the WordPress blog in which you, well, Blog — can be linked in through OpenSocial — and you make an attempt to pigeon-hole the development as something even remotely equivalent to Facebook?
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but laugh.
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Daniel,
Yes, I understand Google is trying to outflank Facebook by playing the “meta” game. But, as O’Reilly pointed out, there’s no data portability between networks so right now the most generous thing one could say about OpenSocial is that it’s some sort of JVM for social platforms.
As far as developers are concerned they’re going to be developing for verticals. Really, of course, this effectively means MySpace, since that’s like 90% of OpenSocial’s userbase.
We’ll see how this plays out — I’m not convinced.
There’s a difference between “Open Social is a good move by Google, MySpace and friends” and “FACEBOOK IS DOOMED! DOOOOOOOOMED!”
MySpace had to come out with some sort of viable API. Google jumpstarted them on that. Smaller, niche social networks (the kind that Ning can help you build) benefit from having a simple way to connect to other networks. Google jumpstarted that. That’s all neat. If it doesn’t end up as N slightly different implementations of OpenSocial on N different social networks, with N different data policies. Ok, that’s a risk, but let’s assume that doesn’t happen. In the long term, that provides a challenge for a Facebook, but that challenge was coming one way or another anyways. In tech, walled gardens tend to evolve over time towards open systems (vendor-owned network protocols to TCP/IP; app vendor-owned data transport protocols -> HTTP). Facebook needs to be aware of this and work with this curve, rather than, oh, fighting it tooth and nail to some breaking point. But that’s a long term challenge that starts with OpenSocial. And they have a partner in Microsoft who has proven adept enough at navigating that type of challenge. This isn’t the first time “everyone else” has jumped into a consortium with Microsoft on the other side.
Facebook users are not going to a) run away b) stop attracting their friends as new users just because someone released a new API. Facebook has not been succeeding because the world lacks a cross-platform social networking application API. Facebook has been growing because they provide a good service. As long as they continue to improve like they have in the last year, they have a bright future. More than 99% of Facebook users won’t know what OpenSocial is. They’ll only know whether they like the Facebook experience and whether their friends are there.
As a Facebook user, I’m not going to run out and get myself a MySpace account on account of OpenSocial. As a Facebook developer, I am going to clean up a couple things in my code to make things a little less Facebook centric except at the view layer, in preparation for a more open social world. After that, we’ll see what the future holds, but who didn’t think Facebook would face strong competitive moves from the likes of MySpace and Google in any event?
“If you’re on MySpace you’re not going to be able to switch to another social network and take your MySpace data with you.”
Stop spreading FUD about OpenSocial because you can do just that with it, it’s called the “People Data API”:
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/gdata/people/developers_guide_protocol.html
patcito,
“The OpenSocial People data API hasn’t been released yet; this document is a preview of the developer’s guide that we’ll publish when we release the data API. All of the details are subject to change, but this preview should give you a general idea of what the API will be like.”
And as O’Reilly pointed out, this is like moving an inch in the direction of real data portability.
Gimme a break. MySpace is only a small part of the pie. Sure they have hordes of users, but look at all the possibilities for distribution outside of MySpace. Facebook apps only work in the Facebook container. OpenSocial apps will, in theory, work in any container that adheres to the OpenSocial API. Sounds like a good distribution model to me.
Matt,
The proof is in the pudding. My point is that it’s not about the size of the networks (which is what the press says), the openness of the data (which is what O’Reilly) says, but distribution.
If OpenSocial can pull it of *then* we have a real fight on our hands. Right now it’s a bunch of nothing.
I’d also add that I’m not anti-OpenSocial, but I think Facebook has solved a real problem, as evidenced by the fact that both their internal and third-party apps on the platform have taken off like a rocket.
If OpenSocial doesn’t even address that problem then they’re still two steps behind.
[…] A 20bits blog post about OpenSocial […]
Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you!
Good luck and successes in blogging!
[…] OpenSocial platform will become more popular than the current Facebook platform. 20bits.com has a great article covering some thoughts on this as well as the weight of success of OpenSocial being based on […]