Yesterday, a friend of mine told me that he and 20 other people are founding their own church. They already pay their own pastor and now they are looking for a home for their church service, i.e. a club or a bar. They call their project “Projekt X”, because they are from the Generation X and their church should fit the needs of people from the Generation X.
This instantly reminded me of the long tail phenomena. Thus, this phenomena does not only appear on the Internet or in economics. It seems to be a general trend. We are living in exciting times – so have a good time!
Sharp tongues say that “Web 2.0 means selling people their own content via advertising”. This does not work, of course:
The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media†sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.
What seems to be happening is that Google has finally realized that they are competing for developers’ time, even those that they are not employing. After seeing thousands of Facebook developers build over 26,000 applications in a year, it’s no wonder that the company has become heavily invested in the fight for developer attention.
Microsoft had realized this two centuries before: the developers (= producers) are the key to the success for every platform! Microsoft did a great job in the past years to build strong developer communities and they spend a lot of money to build and extend these communities and so does Facebook, but not Google …
It is true: Facebook opens the source code of his platform.
A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to us that the social networking company will announce an open-source initiative around its Facebook Platform sometime today or tomorrow. We originally broke this story we broke yesterday. We’ve also learned from another source that the name of the initiative will be fbOpen.
This puts high pressure on the OpenSocial initiative, because now there is a free and open implementation for a (de-facto-)standard available. Yes, OpenSocial is an open standard, but fbOpen will be a standard which costs you at least nothing to implement because the implementation is open. Facebook takes another step towards the leading consumer-oriented PaaS-Provider. If you ever wondered why Facebook is valued this high – now you have the answer. Becoming a technology standard, makes you valuable and indispensable. Think about this: in the future every web application will have a social networking feature, because it is natural for humans to work together or to spend their free time with friends. So social networking will become a matter of course and fbOpen will perhaps become the standard for social networking and so the standard for nearly every web application … uuuh.
Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible – meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.
Thanks again to all participants, speakers and organizers of the Startup-Day! It was a great event! We had about 40 to 50 listeners. The feedback was primarily positive and the founders joined actively the conversations and discussions.
My favorite game is Civilization, Civilization IV. Because playing Civ is somewhat like starting a company. You invest a lot of time, you make your plans, you start to grow, you analyse your competitors, you find your unique strengths, you reinvest your resources and finally you enter new territory.
What’s your favorite game? And why? Have a good time!
The symptoms are obvious now, but the causes still remain unclear (users get bored, get concerned about privacy, get frustrated by complexity …):
The latest stats from Nielsen Online show a significant decline in month-over-month unique visitors to Facebook in the US. In April, traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March. Year-over-year traffic growth decelerated from 98% to a much more modest 56%. MySpace also saw a modest decline (from 60.3M to 58.7M), while LinkedIn continued its torrid growth from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.
