Who Will Rule the New Internet?

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Why Facebook Opened Up
The word platform reached buzzword status a year ago when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the start of a movement. "Social networks are closed platforms," Zuckerberg told a gathering of about 800 developers in San Francisco. "Today we're going to change all that."

You can watch the video of the speech, as I did, by Googling the name of the developers' conference, "F8." What made F8 significant, historic even, was that it was the first time the Facebook platform was thrown open to developers. Anyone who knew how to write applications for Facebook was invited in. Andreessen says an open-coding environment is key to any successful platform because the easier it is to use, the more developers will be drawn to it, making the platform that much more powerful. Facebook also gave developers free distribution. Users who want to add a new app can do so with one-click simplicity. All this, says Andreessen, who is rumored to be considering a seat on Facebook's board, has helped make Facebook compelling: "The point of being a platform is you can enable creativity on the part of thousands or millions of other people who you don't have to pay and who have ideas that you wouldn't have thought of."

That's precisely what has happened at Facebook during the past year. A kind of gold rush took hold as developer after developer started writing simple applications. As of June 1, some 24,000 programs — ranging from simple social gestures, like the ability to virtually poke a friend, to fully formed games like Scrabulous — were available to Facebook's users. Expect loads more. Facebook has given out its API keys — the code that developers need to access Facebook's platform—an astounding 400,000 times, many more than even Zuckerberg expected.

Zuckerberg, 24, is a hot ticket on the conference circuit, and when I spoke to him, he had just returned to Palo Alto, Calif., from a major tech-industry event near San Diego. There he had been grilled yet again on whether he'd sell Facebook to Microsoft, whose minority investment gave Facebook a $15 billion valuation. (Microsoft, which tried and failed to buy Yahoo!, could use a new platform itself.) Yet again Zuckerberg said no, he's not selling out — he's just trying to build a great and viable platform and that takes time. Zuckerberg speaks in a steady, mellifluous tenor; he has a long neck and tends to point his chin upward, as if aiming the bell of a saxophone. "A lot of the last year in developing the platform has just been keeping up with the runaway success there," he says.

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.