Thinking Out Loud: Facebook

John Battelle's Searchblog
"There is no question that Mark and Facebook are getting the Google circa 2004 treatment," says search guru John Battelle on his Searchblog. Mark Zuckerberg's story is similar to that of Google boys Sergey Brin and Larry Page. A young entrepreneur drops out of a top college (Harvard) to nurture "a simple but powerful idea" into a billion-dollar business.
Facebook still has a long, long way to go to get into Google territory, but Zuckerberg's open app decision may have given the social network the legs it needs to grow into something truly huge. But Facebook has a different sort of problem to Google, in that it can't necessarily beat its competitors by offering better technology. The business of social networking is all about the users, innovation, and ease-of-use.
Battelle lists a bunch of questions that he'll ask Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Among them: "How do you handicap the competition, and what will keep Facebook on its current growth trajectory?" Is Facebook on the path to direct competition with Google? "Can you imagine Facebook as a broader search or portal company?" Finally, Battelle will ask about the future of advertising on Facebook, more pointedly, how it intends to grow. - Read the whole story...

A La Facebook, Yahoo Opens Back-End to Developers

Tearing a page out of the social networking playbook, Yahoo has decided to appeal to developers to help build stickiness for its offerings.

By releasing the source code for a number of its web properties and functionalities, CEO Jerry Yang's team hopes to generate a comeback for the brand that models Facebook's jump in traffic since it liberated its back-end code.

Businessweek reports that a beta version of the new My Yahoo site already enables users to link to Gmail. The New York Times and Netflix have also released widgets on the destination, allowing consumers to read stories from customized home pages and rent films.

Big App Acquisition Turns Facebook into 'Real Platform'

'Where I've Been' - monetized by the bonafide 'Platform' Think an app on its own can't be worth $3 million? Apparently the "Where I've Been" application, featured on Facebook, is. Travel company TripAdvisor has shelled out $3 million, the largest Facebook app acquisition to date, for Where I've Been by Craig Ulliott. The acquisition is "the first major successful exit of a Facebook application since the Platform launched," according to Inside Facebook. "This means Facebook is a real platform," said Founder Naval Ravikant of Hitforge. Ravikant, a "Facebook platform" investor, admits to thinking Ulliott sold too early. Nonetheless, "$3M is a great return for the amount of time he invested." Where I've Been has collected 2.3 million users in the handful of months since Facebook first opened to outside apps a few months ago. When the site experienced a deluge of outside applications and a spike in user activity, LinkedIn followed suit. MySpace is also considering the move.

Widgetbox Remote Gallery: An Open Platform For Widgets

Duncan Riley
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Widgetbox have announced the wide-spread adoption of its new Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature which eases the transition to an open platform for social networks.
The Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature enables social networks to embed a select number of widgets from third party developers and provide access to the over 10,000 widgets from the Widgetbox main gallery, giving their users the ability to easily find and use widgets to customize their profiles, blogs and web pages.
Partners can brand their own Widgetbox Remote Gallery and have control over the widget selection in the Widgetbox Remote Gallery. Galleries can be as large or small as desired and widget selection can be rotated as needed.
Launch partners include Freewebs, imbee.com, Xanga and Six Apart’s TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.