Remember when Facebook first hit the scene? I sure do. I had heard about the MySpaces, and had in fact set up a profile, but I was peeved with not only the overall quality of the pages, but also the length of time required to get profile pages to load. This, kids, is what happens when people with no HTML skills try to use spyware-laden tools to be creative.
And then, there was Facebook. And it was good: MySpace, with its heavy-handed marketing focus, was the annoying, belligerent 13-year-old screaming at everything and everyone that walked past, begging for attention. Facebook was the 20-year-old wunderkind waiting patiently to meet the King of Sweden.
I remember, specifically, the easy, intuitive nature of the Facebook interface, and was especially pleased with the fact that I didn't have to listen to some stupid Emo song any time I looked at someone's profile. And now, just three short years later, Facebook is about to make a quantum leap into coolness: they've debuted the Facebook Application platform.
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington writes that with this release, Facebook is now the "Anti-MySpace,"(follow-up post here) but I think we're way past that. Facebook is moving from Social Networking into a new and different frontier, and can no longer be compared to NewsCorp's baby. What the new platform promises is a sort of "Web 2.1" that takes all of the awesomeness of Web 2.0 and puts it in one place, waters it, and lets it grow into something spectacular. Matt wrote about this occurring on a smaller scale a couple months ago when FB added its status feature, a Twitter-like add-on that allows users to keep friends up to date on what they're doing at any given moment. But now, the Status tool is outmoded, because Twitter itself has written an application for Facebook that can effectively replace the Status tool. (And, in an awesome display of Meta, Micah Sifry used the Twitter widget to say, "wondering whether Facebook just got feature creep.")
So now, the fundamental question raised by Facebook's move is, how is Web 2.1 different from Web 2.0?
I think the key to answering this question lies in nature. Web 2.0 applications like Social Networking Sites or youTube or Flickr are associated with viruses. Ask any marketing director what the hot new term for this decade is and they'll say "viral marketing." How did youTube get so huge? Flickr? Viral marketing. The concept is simple: "infect" people with what Seth Godin, during his talk at PDF a few weeks ago, called an "ideavirus" and, assuming you have something that people are interested in (a 100% infection rate), you get a very predictable exponential growth.
So you've got these ideaviruses. And they're out there in the ether, floating around and infecting people. You occasionally come across the equivalent of equatorial jungle with sites like BoingBoing teeming with Internet versions of Ebola, SARS and Small Pox - superbugs like Vote Different and LOLcats. But once they're out there, they don't change much; there are currently very few good examples of ideavirus mutation.
This is, I think, where Web 2.1 comes in. When you open up a platform and encourage development in the way Facebook has, you give ideaviruses a chance to mutate, a chance to become more efficient. Then, their growth is much more life-like. You can still have the exponential growth of infection, but with all of Web 2.0 in one spot, and with people being able to easily change or mashup multiple aspects of software, the genetics of these applications can evolve at the same time they replicate, and natural selection can occur online by people choosing to install the better application. A parent, like Facebook's Status app, can evolve into a more efficient app, like Twitter, and then, because of the greater appeal of its increased efficiency, spread more quickly. Suddenly it's no longer just an ideavirus but an ideaecology
Of course, there are drawbacks. Facebook has often been compared to the "walled gardens" of the early Internet - Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve - and with that lack of outside influence, the chances of mutation and improvement from cross-pollination are greatly reduced, and nature is echoed online. The real-world problem of Medieval monarchs marrying within the family and producing offspring with genetic defects might be seen on Facebook: five different versions of applications with different names that basically do the same thing. That's pretty boring.
Whatever the repercussions of this move may be, it's obvious that Facebook has done something really cool, and we're sure to see a lot more coming out of this in the future.
