From allfacebook, news that Facebook is going to export their platform to the whole web. More here.
In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.
This is clearly a response to Google’s Open Social. And it’s not the only time I’ve noticed, in the past month, a market leader scoffing at Google.
Take for example this quote from Nokia on Android in the Times recently:
“We’ve seen an announcement,” Nokia’s chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Conceptually, we could have made that announcement a long time ago.”
I think it’s interesting to see companies that might otherwise tremble at the Great Google shrug and say “we could do that.”
heheh, when I recently said “applications don’t matter” ( http://twitter.com/nmw/statuses/473094552 ) some pundits said “that’s absurd“. Seems like it wasn’t so absurd after all (BTW: I got no response when I asked the pundit to explain why it was deemed “absurd” — see http://twitter.com/nmw/statuses/475751812 😉
I think it’s a sign that the Goog is playing outside its usual haunts. With search, ads, and webmail, it was entering fields where the leaders were complacent. Was Hotmail really working hard on R&D but just didn’t work hard enough to beat off a determined competitor? No, Hotmail was and is run as a user strip mining operation. Microsoft might as well be plugging its poor bloody users into one of those Matrix body farm batteries.
But Facebook … despite their Project Spill Your Beans fuckup (or whatever that advertising shenanigan was called), they are furiously innovating. They aren’t just the leaders, they’re actively defining the AOL 2.0 space. Every day Google waits is another ten thousand users more that Google is behind and another twentieth of a feature that they have to implement.
The same is true of Nokia. Ooh, it’s an open source phone. Nokia had Perl and Python running on their phones four years ago. They’ve made Linux internet tablets. The Nokia 800 was basically an iPod Touch without the sexy user interface stuff that Apple brings. So they are very vulnerable to user interface innovations. But really? Is Google going to bring an elegant aesthetic to mobile? Yeah, that last question makes me laugh too.
So there’s an uphill battle here for the big G. They have shitloads of money so can buy partnerships and hire engineers. But they’ll need to get a sense of taste that doesn’t wear baggy shorts, ponytails, and sneakers with mismatched socks. And they’ll need to deliver not just cool technology but actual value, something that’s dependent on their strengths rather than something Nokia can copy or do first. It’s a huge come-from-behind play and I would love to know whether they realize just what they’re up against.