Comparing Social Platforms
- Dave Morin, Facebook
- Allen Hurff, MySpace
- Jessica Alter, Bebo
- Patrock Chanezon, Google (Open Social)
- David Recordon
- Justin Smith, Inside Facebook
Dave: Making changes to the Facebook profile. It’s a core part of the user’s identity. Throughout the last year with the launch of the Platform, we have had many points of integration.
These new changes are focused on the actions that the users are taking. What are some of the most important things a user does?
Giving developers the hooks they need to help the user really represent themselves.
Jessica: Bebo has always been focused on user engagement. Our main way of showing applications that are rising to the top is through user-generated ratings.
Allen: MySpace is trying to take advantages of two surfaces: profile page and personal home page.
The home page is very different than a profile page because it’s private. There are different elements of engagement. We are trying to build this platform, not niche profile apps.
We need to continue to make data more available to the user.
Dave M: We want to make it clear that our intent is to enable the user to take their data with them. Both the developer and the user should be able to take their data with them. Over the next year, we are thinking of how to do that both on Facebook, and off Facebook.
As an industry, it’s our responsibility to work together to define the future of privacy portability. We are just now in the beginnings of figuring this out together.
Dave R: You can’t just go out and say, you need data portability. How am I gonna build something that will really add value to my user. As a byproduct, you will get data portability.
Making it easier for people to go and create their own mashups. Facebook platform is the next generation of the mashup. Instead of taking data from multiple sources, you can build an entire application in a website.
That next evolution here will be websites seamlessly talking to each other with mashups.
Patrick: It’s really about the social web over the social network. In OpenSocial, we tried to define the core set of data that would be useful for social applications on the web.
But, iGoogle is more of a social content platform rather than a social network. OpenSocial is very extensible.
Allen: It would be arrogant for us to think that we can build an application better than a developer could.
Dave M: Why is Facebook photos so powerful? The social graph is a powerful thing. Over the last year, we have had 30,000 apps built on Facebook, and millions of others on yours. Think of it as a market.
There are amazing verticals that haven’t even been tapped yet. Look at things like productivity.
The social graph hasn’t even been tapped yet.
Dave R: We just put out a Facebook app that allows you to blog from right inside Facebook.
Dave M: We are focusing the profile more on the actions of the users. The distribution of the marketplace is gonna be bigger soon.
Jessica: When we look at the marketplace we think, how can applications help us and how can we help them? It has changed from a business development perspective.
Dave R: Imagine if you could write an application where you could interact with someone as they are blogging.
Dave M: User experience is the most important thing. We spend a ton of time trying to think about how these incentives are aligned.
Jessica: We have endless conversations about how the health of viral channels work. People spend hours and hours a day trying to tweak things, and we have conversations all the way up to our CEOs. If we can encourage engagement in a right way, they will be rewarded naturally.
Allen: With the developer platform, we’ve seen some people do some really unique things. Maybe we should talk to them about it.
We found an application that emails a user. Is that annoying? Maybe you should get an indicator instead of a mail.
The last thing MySpace wants to get into is something that is socially spammy. I love developers, but I love users tenfold.
Dave M: The user experience should be protected. There might be some applications that might need to send a bunch of emails. What if you want to invite 100 friends to support a cause like breast cancer? There might be some applications that might send to deliver many messages for a user to take one action.
We as a collective community need to think about these kinds of things. How do we set rules and deliver incentives?
Sometimes we see viral, but no social. How do we make this application as social as possible?
Social commerce is the future of the web. What are your friends buying? I think this will provide new monetization models.
Dave R: These things need to be easy. Building applications has to be easy. As a developer, I should not have to think about submitting it to 30 different directories. Extensibility is important.
Patrick: Two words about monetization: AdSense and Checkout
Question: As we rely on these APIs and platforms, what is going to happen with positional SLAs? Will there be a premium model for us with guaranteed uptime, or continued support?
Dave M: We are still in the first year of development, so we are defining it.
Jessica: Committment goes into it. We cannot exist if we aren’t giving a high percentage of uptime. When our site goes down, you feel it as one person, but we feel it as millions of users going down.
