Facebook Developer Garage in Seattle
posted in Technology, Developers, Business |Rahul has a good write up about the Facebook developer garage last night. First of all I’d like to thank the hosts- both the local Seattle guys and the Facebook team that flew up for the event. They sent a bunch of people which is a pretty big statement about how seriously they are taking this platform stuff.
A couple of my own observations about the recent Facebook stuff, especially in relation to their platform aspirations-
The big draw here is that Facebook is becoming the magic way that you sprinkle “viral” on anything. Up to now just about every startup I have worked with has spent lots of time trying to figure out how to build some viral mechanisms into their products. No one wants to go spend millions on saturation advertising campaigns (not that those necessarily work so well anymore anyway) so the premise of building some cool small feature and having exponential userbase growth to millions of users in just a week or two sounds great.
Of course building those features and managing the community and social aspects of pulling it off can be very hard (ok, building the feature is easy, its the other part that is hard). By use Facebook’s existing community and viral mechanisms, in theory it should be much easier to latch into their 33M and growing userbase with your app. You still need to build a compelling app and think through why people want to share it, but probably half the work is already done for you (including some of the hard part).
At the same time, Facebook does have a few problems to deal with. First of all the definition of “compelling app” has been a bit loose initially. There are a number of very simple apps that have had great success getting millions of users to sign up with them in a short time, but its hard to see how those are going to stand the test of time and generate any meaningful revenue. On the other hand iLike is probably the definition right now of what it means to be a compelling app, bringing a bunch of rich information to the picture and tapping into some deep needs that are especially social.
Peyman pointed out to me that one of the big things they are missing is revenue share. My initial reply was that with 2000 developers signing up in 2-3 months, who needs to bother with revenue share? The size of the potential audience is large enough that people will gladly build apps without getting revenue directly from Facebook.
But what this is missing is the issue of alignment of interests. Right now listening to some of the people building Facebook apps, it sounds like most of them are just trying to grab Facebook users and channel them into their own things. There was lots of frustration with Facebook limiting amount of notification, but its pretty clear to me why they do that- right now people would spam the heck out of the users if they could. In any case, a rev-share scheme would align developer’s interests with those of Facebook. It worked pretty well for Google AdSense, and although it is not directly the same thing, they could make this work for them.
Early on the host asked who was working on this stuff for their day job. It was striking to me that almost no one raised their hands. Maybe those who are working on this full-time either didn’t have time to show up for this event or were just keeping their hands down. This is not to slight the potential of some of those nights and weekend projects to hit it big, but it also shows how early all this stuff is.
Finally it feels like Facebook is dealing with some real identity / culture issues. They grew up as a college oriented network, but unlike MySpace have focused on keeping things clean and less obnoxious. Yet, many of the developers there said that the audience seems like mostly high-school students, and many of the apps are cutesy in a way that is likely to turn off audiences older than 25. They have a real opportunity right now to catch a broader audience of the country, but at the same time there is a big danger of a backlash if the older audience doesn’t feel like spending time on Facebook means being overrun by high-school kids and content that is tuned for them.