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Facebook’s Largest Asset: Developers

Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 29th, 2007 5:23 PM

Over the past few months, Facebook has witnessed a growing base of dedicated platform developers. Launching hundreds of applications a day, these developers are hoping to grab a piece of the extremely valuable Facebook real estate. Except for the Linux and Microsoft operating systems, I have never seen such a dedicated base of developers. These developers are working night and day to launch what they hope to be the next popular application on Facebook. There’s one thing that Facebook gets to enjoy currently: no competition.

Facebook is not simply a social network, they are a social platform and currently there is nobody in the space. Facebook will have a whopping 6 month lead on all competitors (at a minimum) and that lead may continue to grow. What will happen when the new platforms launch though? Are the 120,000 developers (120,000 have added the developer application but the majority have not built an app) that are currently on Facebook going to go to another platform? Definitely!

Facebook has been working hard to help build a developer community through their Facebook Developer Garages (as I posted about yesterday) and through the developer forum. I would guess that we are going to see a significant slowdown in the growth of new applications once MySpace and competing platforms launch. Those developers that have built significant properties on Facebook will continue to be dedicated to Facebook but they are also going to try to expand outside of Facebook. The developers that have not built a significant presence due to the increasing barrier to success are going to go elsewhere and potentially not look back.

So what does Facebook need to do? Well there are a number of things (some of which I will be covering in the next couple days), but the primary thing is to continue providing significant incentives to developers. As the likelihood of building a large user base on Facebook (without investing in marketing) decreases, Facebook is going to need to provide new services and offerings for developers. Any suggestions about what those should be?

Posted in Analysis, Programming
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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Analysis, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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