Open Face
Facebook has recently announced that it is allowing anyone to develop features for its highly popular social-networking site. Clearly, social networking sites are all struggling with how to monetise their current success in revolutinising the way people interact online. Facebook is second only in traffic to MySpace with 23 million visitors last month -- MySpace had 67 million -- but even as both add hundreds of thousands members daily, there is no clear road to profit. I think this bold move by Facebook's 20-something CEO, Mark Zuckerberg shows some clever thinking.
The new developer platform debuted with 85 new features, the most popular to date being music service iLike, with around 40,000 Facebook users after being live for just one day, more than the rest of the top ten applications combined. The application was added by 10,000 users within the first ten hours of the service being live, and 10,000 more in the following three hours. It seems to be increasing by about 100/minute at this point. Once installed, users can search for and add their favorite music and concert information to their profile.
I first came across iLike last year when I was pointed towards it by a friend at Ticketmaster in LA when they took a 25% piece of it. Now it is integrated with Facebook, I think it's an even more fabulous tool.
While I am on a Facebook rant, let me point to Steve Rubel's recent piece on the new era of hyper-networked PR practitioners. Like Steve, I am also a firm believer that the successful pure-play PR hack of the future needs to be hypernetworked. So get yourself a blog, get Facebooked and LinkedIn and you'll be on your way.
/dp
