Bebo Launch Grants Monopolies

Posted by Boris Silver on December 14th, 2007 1:54 PM

Someone had to say it. As CEO of an application oriented company, I’m really disappointed so far with the Bebo Platform Launch. My bias is upfront: my company was left out of the launch in Sports, an area where we were one of the leaders on Facebook. According to a graph on Adonomics, our Fantasy Football application against the soccer applications from our rivals Fantasy Moguls and Pickspal (both of whom were included in the launch). Looks like we’re crushing one and keeping fairly close with the other.

Here’s the essence of the Bebo Platform as explained by Mark Hendrickson on Tech Crunch:

“While applications from about 40 launch partners will go live tonight on the “new” platform (with a total of 50 applications), the platform won’t be open to other developers until a couple of weeks or so from now.”

So… Bebo is launching an application Platform and waiting a couple of weeks to open it up to other developers. Why even bother releasing a platform? Why not just say, “hey these are the hand chosen special companies that will get to grow on our platform” ? That’s what this launch feels like to me. The early companies are getting enromous advantages in growing their userbases and exploiting bugs in the current version of the Bebo platform. RockYou already has an application out with about 110,000 users and it hasn’t even been 48 hours since launch. In application platforms, it’s a huge uphill battle to catch up if you’re even a couple days late on launch.

Here’s an easy example comparing 2 similar applications from the Facebook Platform:

228,091 daily active users on Free Gifts

2,531 daily active users on iGift

The difference? iGift launched a little under a week on Facebook and Free Gifts was able to grow like fire before iGift was able to get their application out. The results are clear: Free Gifts is a dominant application.Imagine being 2-3 weeks late on a launch all because Bebo tied your hands behind your back and opened the golden doors to the hand picked companies. Now imagine that your company is doing just as well or better than the hand picked companies on other platforms. How would you feel?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Analysis. 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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Anonymous 9 months ago 1 point
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Facebook did the same thing with its launch and with its favoritism to certain app developers. All of these 'open' platforms give advantages to bigger players.

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Tom 9 months ago 1 point
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I feel your pain. I submitted apps starting 6 days after the fb launch. It took them 5 weeks to approve them. 5 weeks while watching all those that launched rocket up.

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Jeff 9 months ago 1 point
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I absolutely agree. I think Bebo is elitist and playing favorites for no apparent good reason. They deserve to be a 2nd or 3rd tier social network, as the people who run this platform clearly don't know how to build relationships with developers

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Mark 9 months ago 1 point
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cool, line up your excuses BEFORE your app even has a chance to bomb.

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http://FacebookEconomy.com

Boris Silver 9 months ago 1 point
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Mark,

I'm not sitting on the sidelines watching other people make apps and commenting about it -- I'm in the thick of it all. Perhaps my apps will bomb in the future, but so far they haven't. My company has found success on Facebook and I see no reason why we can't continue that success if we were given the same access to the Bebo Platform as other companies.

-Boris M. Silver

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http://borismsilver.wordpress.com

Jason Rubenstein 9 months ago 1 point
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A difference from the FB launch: this gives launch-partners a wide opportunity to grab markets that didn't develop until well after the F8 launch. Simply by observing the most successful FB, apps of the last 6 months, launch partners have a wealth of choices for Bebo app development.

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http://apps.facebook.com/threewords/

Michael Birch 9 months ago 1 point
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I'm the CEO of Bebo and just wanted to explain the reason from the Bebo perspective. I understand your pain and this is not an environment we wanted to create but were stuck with a tough choice. We launched the Bebo platform all at one time, the API's etc, FB did this as a phased release. We are also launching into a mature market where there are 1000's of apps ready to deploy, when FB launched they had launch partners whilst everyone else had to scramble to develop from scratch which took a week or 2 at least. If we just opened up to all at once we'd have 1000's of untested apps running on Bebo which would in all likelihood take the site down. We've had problems scaling as it is with just 40 apps. We do plan to be a totally level playing field and ensure that it's the best apps that win not just the spammy apps, I acknowledge that there is an advantage being first but we had to put the user experience first.

We will go live to all as soon as we feel we've reached stability with the platform. We had a long weekend fixing issues so not quite there yet...

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