Chapter 3.0: The Platform Wars

Developers are the key to victory in the upcoming Social Platform Wars. The 15 billion dollar question is how do you attract developers to your platform? Facebook and their VC partners announced a $10M fund and claim that over 80,000 developers have registered so far. This is an impressive number but Facebook opened the door to a new industry. Out of the gate, will the next platform released garner as much attention? This is difficult to predict. This is a new industry so you may see the same early adopters evaluate a competing framework.

So far, social application service providers have been able to quickly monetize the Facebook platform and this will remain an important factor in driving developer support. Tools and libraries will also be essential. Facebook started this by introducing the Facebook Markup Language or FBML. FBML provides XML tags that enable application developers to embed UI functionality in their application that is consistent with the Facebook UI. This can be compared to the tools available in Visual Basic, PowerBuilder and other similar technologies. By providing developers with tools and libraries that allow them to efficiently work on business logic you reduce the time to market and the technical aptitude required to build the application.

Portability is the one caveat of platform specific libraries; although, we don’t see this as a difficult technical problem. The smart ones will embed their business/application logic in reusable components or services so they only have to port pieces of the UI.

Just about everyone has seen this but for those who haven’t witnessed Steve Balmer having a Howard Dean moment, enjoy.