The New Application Developers

The dirty secret of social networking website development so far - how do you actually get people on the site? In the past the path has been treacherous at best, consisting of a fair amount of traditional-style promotion and PR.

Now, major social networking sites such as FaceBook are presenting APIs. More than just surface integration, these APIs allow you to treat the social networking sites as platforms, meaning you can become a third-party application developer. Suddenly a lot of opportunity appears.

As is detailed here, anyone can write an application for Facebook that pulls information from a user's profile, including preferences, his network, friends etc. Users are, by default, encouraged to spread applications virally, and the better applications take advantage of the user's network.

Suddenly there is a viable alternative strategy to bootstrapping your own social network. You can simply build applications for Facebook, or other established social networks, and use their critical mass to hook into whatever you offer as a unique value. Of course the more of a purple cow you are, the more traction you'll gain.

Its amazing how full-circle this is. Suddenly web developers become like desktop application developers in the 80s and 90s, looking at their apps and deciding which platforms they want to target. Should we make a version for Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace? Well, which is our target market? Hm....