4 Mar 2010
Evolving into a Platform, part Tres
When I was thinking about this last night, I went down the path of whether a company can create a platform that made it competitive for other application developers to build on that platform.
This is necessary but I think it was a bit of a roundabout approach; if your platform speeds building features that the end-user needs, then companies will come to build on you. I think that’s pretty obvious and I just needed a good night’s sleep to say that concisely :-)
Take the domain of ‘status-updating’ applications, if that’s even a domain: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. Could you imagine a platform that made it competitive for those apps to build on it? It seems to me that one of the key advantages of any such platform would be the social network itself, which is exactly what any of those status updating sites would not want to cede control of at all :-)
As another example, take photo-storage/presentation, like Picasa or Facebook’s photo apps. I can’t count the number of times I thought it’d be advantageous to upload my photos somewhere and be able to present them on Facebook, or Flickr, or on Picasa, or on MySpace, or in email. Instead my photo collection is scattered among Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa and I keep putting off unifying it out of the realization that eventually I’ll have to put them back on a site just so my grandparents can see them, since they only know one site.
Suppose you could offer users the incentive “upload your photos here, and it’s super easy to show them on whatever site you’d want to”. Users would upload photos to your site, then go to Facebook and do all the appropriate tagging/posting on walls, etc. Which means the platform would have to support innovations that happened at the application layer (particularly, tagging, among others)
The incentive for applications to build on top of this? Well, they could save on photo storage, for one. That has to cause some of the greatest storage requirements from their users. They cede control, but they avoid turning away a user that already has all their photos uploaded somewhere.
Anyways, I am speculating that this has already been tried, and Facebook would probably pay the storage costs to maintain storage of users’ data; it’s part of what makes a social networking site sticky.
