When to play platform games
What makes Facebook work as a platform? Should your company emulate it?
Here at the Web 2.0 Summit, you can feel the envy that entrepreneurs have for Facebook and the huge lift the company got from opening up its service and making it into a platform that other developers can write for. Many startup CEOs I've talked to lately say they plan to release their product as a platform.
The instinct is good. Businesses based on platforms are more powerful than those based just on products. But there's more to platformizing a company than just publishing a few APIs. If you look at the Web services that became successful platforms, you see something similar in each of them. They offer more than just a way to do things: They all have either content or community that you simply cannot get anywhere else. Let's look at successful platforms for examples:
- Facebook. Facebook exposes its "social graph," the database of its users and how they are connected, to applications. That's its secret. That's why it's a platform and MySpace, so far, is just a bucket for code. MySpace widgets can't access MySpace aside from appearing on a page. That's pretty lame. Facebook apps, on the other hand, by default have direct access to Facebook's most important asset.
The takeaway, for Web entrepreneurs, is not to get too carried away with the idea of making your service into a platform. At least not at first. You need to build you network of users first. Once you've got an interconnected collection of people or companies or data, then you may be able to accelerate its growth by opening it up to the world. But not before.