The Facebook platform: Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 a second time around?
31 August 2007, by Karl Bunyan
The Facebook API as opened up a huge opportunity for developers to build applications with potentially huge audiences, but is Facebook's Web 2.0 just an accelerated cycle of Web 1.0 all over again? 
The Facebook API as opened up a huge opportunity for developers to build applications with potentially huge audiences. This has shifted power slightly, away from marketing and towards those who build the applications.
As a result landrush has ensued whereby the successful applications can gain millions of users with almost no marketing effort. Everyone who can develop an app or wants to reach an audience is seeing this and wants a piece of it. The number of applications being released is growing every day and, with over 10,000 registered developers so far, shows no signs of slowing down.
But although the idea of using the Facebook API to create an easy-to-distribute, lightweight, socially-driven application is very Web 2.0, it strikes me that many the business models and the view of the future are very Web 1.0. Things such as:
- A large untapped market with low barriers to entry
- Lower marketing costs than other routes
- A relatively empty market, ripe for exploiting by early adopters
- Promises of future big bucks for anyone who can grab the ‘eyeballs’ of those millions of users
Indeed, we’re already starting to see the transition to later phases of Web 1.0 where the applications that have ‘the eyes’ have made it but those that haven’t are struggling. There are already succesful applications leasing their valuable space to wannabe applications, even from big Web 1.0 players such as Yahoo.
So where’s it all going to go? My predictions, based on Web 1.0 experience:
- The successful applications may keep their dominant position or may not. In the meantime they make money through fairly conventional advertising means.
- New applications find it harder to break into a large user base
- The number of applications grows so much it’s harder to get noticed at all and other means of promoting an application need to be looked at e.g. other online or offline marketing
- People start encouraging companies to add their Facebook application’s name to their business stationery
- Applications will have to work out better ways to monetise all those eyeballs
One of the differences, though, is that as a business model I don’t see the Web 1.0 ‘king of the mountain’ market leader as being a sustainable in the way that e.g. Ebay or Amazon are the undisputed conquerors of their sectors. That may change if the nature of the applications changes i.e. away from fun viral “toys” which go in and out of fashion and towards more useful tools.
Instead of a land grab I think another Web 1.0 phenomenon that Amazon has demonstrated - the long tail - may prove to be the way forward. A large number of applications with smaller user bases, each one generating a small amount of revenue. Successful developers will need to keep their apps fresh, and keep churning them out.
How far the comparisons hold out between Web 1.0 and Web 1.0 version 2 there is one distinct difference, though: the timescales are greatly accelerated. The Internet took a few years to go through the boom and bust cycle and move from eyeballs to revenue models; the Facebook Internet is doing the whole cycle in just a few months.
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August 31, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Filed in: Business & Management, Sales & Marketing
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