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Marc Cantor is ecstatic to hear that Facebook is opening up it’s walled garden by providing developers with a public API (Application Programming Interface). This makes retrieving information from Facebook and displaying the results in any application a snap.
Marc says:
A full 6-12 months ahead of schedule Facebook has - in a single blow - broken open this whole game. Now the race begins to build out services and applications (even content) around these APIs. Anyone wish to guess on how long it’ll take MySpace and Bebo to respond?
This is exactly what I’ve been talking about for the dating industry! I just found out that Yahoo Personals has had an invite-only partner API since January, which I will talk about soon.
Dating sites will open up their walled gardens when they figure out how to make money doing so. Problem is, most of the sites that have approached them haven’t had the vision to create a truly useful service or the technical chops to make it work.
Hopefully the Facebook deal will quicken the pace for well-funded, strategically savvy companies to come knocking on the dating industry’s door and offer up the kinds of value-added services that the major dating sites couldn’t dream of.
SJ Mercury News has a good article about how MySpace drives a growing ecosystem, where several websites have launched complimentary services and gone on to great heights (YouTube and Photobucked.)
GigaOm says that XuQa is letting people import their MySpace profiles wholesale. As an aside, Browser (PC only, boo!) cleans up ugly Myspace pages into a readable format.
Silicon Beat on the MySpace ecosystem.
The only thing a start-up needs is to have MySpace users rave about its features, and its growth will skyrocket.
MySpace is clearly having difficulty figuring out its policy — it is on the fence about how much to encourage other companies serving the ecoystem, or to discourage it.
Absolutely. There are a lot of companies doing much better than expected due to high adoptation rates on MySpace. It’s an incredibly effective way to test new services.
This WSJ article, Moguls of New Media, talks about how Christine Dolce, whose MySpace page boasts nearly one million friends, has leveraged her looks and connections into a start-up clothing company, fame and growing fortune.
There are a lot of young people taking advantage of the viral nature of social networking to launch promising careers built on countless late night webcam sessions in surburban housing tracts across America.
I need to work on my new version of Lazy Sunday. I’m sure it’s going to make me a star.
Technorati Tags: open+profiles, viral+video
Category:Audio Video, Marketing, Social Networking, Traffic Tags: Audio Video - Marketing - social-networking - TrafficBlog reactions
3 responses so far ↓
1
markus (Check me out!)
// Aug 18, 2006 at 10:01 am
I must say what is the point? This kind of thing will of course have restrictions such as any service you build can’t be popular.
Why would a dating site allow a third party to build a competing service that competes and takes all their content?. Myspace only allows you to insert third party objects into its pages, that is no big deal and no risk to myspace. Facebook has 80% market penetration and are in no danger of losing that and the API is capped so that no application can be popular enough to take them down. I get at least one lawsuit threat a week because people’s profiles are showing up in search results.
I can only imagine the legal headaches dating sites would face because not only are users paying for a service, but they also expect privacy to come with it. Ie the dating site can’t provide data feeds that spams a users profile and images all over the net.
2
markus (Check me out!)
// Aug 19, 2006 at 4:22 pm
I would reply to your other post, http://onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2006/08/18/balancing_privacy_with_emerging_business_models.php but it just brings up errors.
You completely missed the point of my post. There is a huge difference between an API and RSS feeds. An API would allow social networking aggregators to be built. In every market they have invaded they have taken over. Just look at shopping sites and job sites.
Does anyone here know what company supplies google maps with its data? Does anyone care?
dating sites don’t create API’s because they want to be the primary interface to their databases.
3
relaxedguy (Check me out!)
// Sep 4, 2006 at 10:25 am
Yes of course there is a difference between an API and RSS. RSS would make it easier for people to navigate the “river of people” based on new signups, matches, etc.
I need to clarify that this new model has two sides, one is dating and social networking sites making their system open to competitors and sharing revenue such as advertising an subscriptions. The other is the consumer side. We want control of our data. Move it from service to service as we please. You should be lucky I’m on your site at all. If you provide unsatisfactory service, I’m gone. This will force sites to stay on top of things like privacy, safety and new types of communication between members, not to mention better customer service.
I agree, nobody cares who Navitec is.
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