Martin Gordon's Blog

Rumors has it that Facebook is on the block and looking to get $2B.

I just heard a Knowledge@Wharton podcast by my former professor and Supernova founder, Kevin Werbach, entitled, "What Makes An Online Community Tick?" featuring Craig Newmark of Craig's List, Julie Herendeen of Yahoo, and Bill Flitter of Pheedo.

Scoble and others are raving about Second Life. They're going as far as claiming its an OS.

Social networks are on everyone's minds these days. Can they last? I'm not too sure.

Amazon believes it had a sound business model. They make money by selling stuff. If people can find things more easily they are more likely to make a purchase. So Amazon released an API. Take the load off the company's shoulders and let others make Amazon better.

Google: same thing. AdWords is a solid business model. It helps everyone make money! Advertisers don't waste ads on people they can't reach; Google takes a bit off the top. All this is funded by people buying things from the ads they see. AdWords has an API. It's in advertisers' best interests for AdWords to be as good as possible. "Fine, do it yourself", says Google. Google provides an excellent service, and advertisers make it even better for themselves. Most of the products Google puts out has an API. They say, "we don't need you to come to our site to make money, we do just fine on other people's sites."

MMORPGs are a different kind of social network. They have some bonus activity attached that only makes the network stronger. Blizzard/Linden can and do charge for this value-added. They also allow scripting of the game. They let others make their software better, driving more people to pay for the service.

What about Facebook and MySpace? They have no APIs. The "software" is closed off to tinkerers for fear that an API could do away with the need to visit the site and feast our eyes upon lovely banner and click-thru ads. Pretty much anything I could imagine wanting from a Facebook API would bring me alternate ways of getting information available on the site, ways that are far away from ads. Tom Carden's brainstorm of uses for a MySpace API mostly deal with getting data off of the network in a different way. He wants podcasts, RSS feeds, etc, just like I do. And I'm sure many others do also.

So will a lack of an API drive Facebook and MySpace into the ground? Probably not. MySpace is already owned by News Corp and Facebook will get bought out any day now. But the lack of an API does signal that these networks are scared and that their revenue models may be a bit flimsy.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social network, Wharton, Knowledge@Wharton, Kevin Werbach, Supernova, podcast, Craig's List, Yahoo, Pheedo, WoW, World of Warcraft, Second Life, API, programming, development, web services, Amazon, Google

A SXSW panel entitled "Design Eye for the List Guy" redesigned Craig's List yesterday. The "Design Eye for the _____ Guy" is actually a series of "experiments" (this one is number three) put on by a group of web designers calling themselves the Design Fab Seven. The mockup looks great, I hope that Craig's List actually implements it. The blue/grey/white theme works great for del.icio.us, but IMO there's too much going on on the Craig's List homepage to have it be so sparse.

Andy Rutledge redesigned Google about a month ago. I recently discovered a Greasemonkey script that will replace the Google homepage with the redesigned one. Some comments I saw complained about how Google's simple page was part of their branding and that it'll never change. I rarely use the Google homepage, but on the off chance that I do, at least it'll look pretty.

Technorati Tags: design, Google, Craig's List, SXSW, South By Southwest, Design Eye, Greasemonkey, Firefox, redesign