Tim O'Reilly Research team just published a book about facebook application.
The truth for me is: if facebook has no such big inventory of interesting app, i will never use facebook. Marc Anderson's comparison of 1994 Geocities and facebook list of function (and Ning of cause) give us a clear pictures about the importance of the app. Without those app or functionality, facebook or Ning will be like Geocities, only personal homepage and photo uploading.
Let's back to the economy: who makes money? First is the platform itself, like Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, second life... Secondly, the most popular app on the platform. But how about the app on the tail? Check the curve again. Its only top 50 of facebook app and decline so fast. Remember they have more than 5000 app? The tail is really very very looooong!
Last week I attended the techcrucnch40 in San Francisco. the big guy of the event is a young guy... Marc Zukerberg, founer of facebook.
During his conversation with Michael Arrington on conference, Marc Zukerberg announced a grant program called fbFund to award the most brilliant development teams on facebook. according to him this project is "to support the ecosystem and help it grow". the growth rate of facebook widgets has already incredible high -- the platform idea launched in May with 85 app, now in 4 months, number of the app increased to 3000! the sum of the fbFund cash award ranges from $25000 to $250000.(we remember that facebook first round founding was $500000). the allocation of that will decided by a panel including Zukerberg himself, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and two of the board members of facebook like first investor Peter Thiel.
After the 45 mins chats with Michael, no media had the chance to interview young Mr. Zukerberg -- by the company of several bodyguards, he left the conference room right away. no one can stop him actually. amazing indeed.
Days after the event, WSJ released the news that Microsoft was interested in acquiring 5% of facebook's share by $500M. the facebook phenomena is there in front of our eyes. as i know, there will be 5 conferences focus on facebook as platform for application development: graphing social patterns, community next: platform, SNAP summit, App-Camp2007 and web community forum: facebook, all held in San Francisco or Seattle in the coming 2or 3 months. check them out and see who will give keynote there. facebook as platform is a real thing. but i haven't notice there are active developer on facebook platform from Asia.
saw a very interesting artcile posted in CrunchGear, futurist.
the point is simple, human nature is lazy. and that will destroy the web 2.0 which based on top of the User Generated Content. even to me. how many accounts we have for the different blogging platforms? and how many still active? that is true. we change the interests, blog host, social networking profiles, restart many times the same profiles and frineds, and in the end, give up again after post the initial 4 or 5 items or photos.
but we stall spend a lot of time browser the web, check email, our friends and network or connection. when we feel tired or confused about the maintaining of the site we opened, some new posts from friends may stimulate our interests again to check the status.
that's why the purely publishing platform will encounter the problem in the end but the so-called social networking site will see the booming for a while. we are lazy by nature. so we couldn't produce or post stuff endlessly. but the friends will keep us in alerted. new friends, new shared link from friends will be the final savor of our nature.
TechCrunch有一個服務是整理所有評論過的公司，將公司的基本資料整理出來，成為 CrunchBase。
the best thing of CrunchBase is we can get the official info from this page, like the founding, the names of people who started this ventures.
but the innovative part of CB is this page connects to news or articles which saved in bookmark website and techcrunch. basically u can search related article by sphere it, but it is still very cool that the TC done for the company.
so we got a small introduction of the web 2.0 companies. we don't know yet if this page will be updated frequently. but it is a good start.
but in some cases the data seems not very complete. for example, in the the item of "del.icio.us" from ChrunchBase we only know that the serious A is founded by union square ventures and it is later acquired by yahoo, but without the info about its angel investor. It happened to be Tim O'Reilly, one of the most influential person in web 2.0 business. I didn't check all the famous website list in CrunchBase at the moment, but I believe sometimes the angel could explain thing more clearly than others.
