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That's what happens when you create a successful platform: a virtuous circle blooms, with a mass of users attracting a horde of developers who build fun or useful stuff, which in turn pulls in even more users. Needless to say, there are some pretty worthless and annoying applications too. At Facebook, app writers' income is derived from advertising based on the number of people who install their programs, and a bunch have adapted in intrusive ways. Facebook has taken flak for applications like FunWall, which made it easy for users to accidentally spam their entire friend lists with e-mail invites to install FunWall. Zuckerberg says Facebook is tweaking its platform to help the most useful apps to spread while squelching the junk.
I ask Zuckerberg about the theory that closed, proprietary networks like Facebook could stifle the Net's innovative spirit. That idea is the subject of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a new book by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He argues that the rise of gated, closed communities like Facebook, the advent of the iPhone and even the seemingly innocuous standards-setting of Google could draw nerd talent away from the disruptive kind of innovation that occurred on the wild and woolly Net. Zuckerberg pauses for a minute to think, then says, "I generally agree with those principles and think that type of openness and portability is extremely important." Great platforms are often closed when they start and open up only as they mature and can handle the load. He adds, "We're kind of leaving that initial phase now and moving to a more open phase."
In fact, last month Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, which would allow users to take their contact lists with them to websites that add a snippet of code. Over time, it will be possible for, say, a blog owner to embed a Facebook-style "wall" on his or her site, which would allow one to read only the comments scrawled there by friends. It's a very cool idea. Facebook everywhere! But there's only one problem. A few days after Facebook Connect was announced, Google launched a nearly identical plan called ... Friend Connect. And if there's anything that could slow Facebook's frantic pace, it's Google.
Google Tries to Connect
The first phase of the web's growth was all about putting information online and giving people a way to find and connect to it. The second and current phase is all about connecting people to one another.
"Social is the new black," says Joe Kraus, who oversees Google's efforts to build out a social layer that runs across the entire Web. In this, as in all things that Google does, Kraus' strategy has been to create an alliance of social networks that will use open standards rather than Facebook's proprietary network and coding language, so that developers can spread their applications.
"Google has relied on an open Internet to make its entire business," he tells me. "It has a genetic predisposition for openness." That's partly because Google's core business, search, depends on openness. Google can't find the things you want on the Web--documents, music, images and so on--unless they are open and accessible, Kraus says. The richest Internet company on the FORTUNE 500 (it's ranked 150, with $16.5 billion in revenue), Google has a business plan that depends on the Web being used by as many people as possible. That's why the company spends so much time and energy building new applications that make the Web more useful or fun.
Social networks are a threat to that business; users tend to stay within their network and communicate among themselves or simply fool around with apps. When Facebook's users are playing Scrabulous or tagging photos, for example, they're not using Google. Indeed, they're more likely to discover new things via friends or in-network applications such as iLike, a service that matches your friends' musical tastes to your own.
So Google retaliated last November with OpenSocial, an alliance of Facebook's competitors--MySpace, hi5 and Google's own social network, Orkut, among others--to try to create a write-once, run-anywhere application platform. That means a developer, with only modest tweaking, can build an application that runs across all the major social networks except, of course, Facebook. "When you talk to developers, most of them don't have 50 people; they can't write their applications 50 different ways," Kraus says. "They really want to write their application once and get as much distribution as possible."
He definitely has a point. But I wonder if Google is too late--and old--for the social-networking party. "Google recognizes it needs to become more people-oriented, but it needs to add that to its existing platform. It's not at all native," says my neighbor, Seth Goldstein, who runs SocialMedia, an advertising network for social networks. "Facebook was designed from the ground up to render these complex and nuanced social relationships."
Why the iPhone Matters
Apple's calculus is much simpler: it doesn't matter who prevails online--Facebook, Google, both or someone else. Steve Jobs simply wants to ensure that you use his devices to get there.
To that end, the new iPhone, which is expected to be announced on June 9, is "hugely significant," says Andreessen, who now presides over a company, Ning, that allows anyone to build his or her own social network. "The iPhone, a lot of people around here believe--and I think this is true--is the first real, fully formed computer that you can put in your hand," he says. "It has all the requirements it needs to be a viable platform."
Matt Murphy--a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers who oversees the $100 million iFund to seed start-ups that build great iPhone apps--goes even further. He claims that the iPhone will "absolutely be the driver of the post-PC world." Murphy points out that the kit needed by developers to build iPhone apps has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and he estimates that about 1,000 applications will be available to consumers when the iPhone-apps store launches with the phone. "If you look at so many of the constraints that have held back the mobile ecosystem, Apple basically takes all of those away and provides an open platform, a great device and a user base that's rabid for these new kinds of applications," he says.