I got a Friend request from Saul Klein for Bebo. It came as a bit of a bolt from the blue - I'm now so attuned to getting Facebook requests that I'd forgotten about other platforms. I'd never been much of a Bebo fan, though it had its seven minutes of fame earlier in the year. Being a social kind of person, I popped over to accept the request, and now I have a friend in Bebo.
Last year Snipperoo visited the VCs who had put money into Bebo. At the end of the meeting they asked what we could offer to Bebo (not because they really cared or were interested, but because they couldn't think of anything else to ask at that point). We thought there was a lot of potential in partnering with social spaces to offer an open yet managed widget system. My reckoning then was that social spaces wanted to control access to their platform so that they could control monetization. There were basically two models: tight control in the manner of MySpace or no control, funnily enough, also in the manner of MySpace. I was offering a third way: open up your space to whatever widgety things your users wanted to add, but through a platform that allows you to track what's going on and to cut revenue share deals and the like where appropriate.
Bebo obviously had another worldview which seems to come straight out of Apple's corporate playbook: exert total control and use our position to cut deals with a few favoured partners who are willing to pay. Sure, this gives a high level of quality control and it allows tight control over revenue ('nothing goes in our site without our sayso'), which probably gives the execs in charge of strategy a good feeling. But it is almost totally against the needs and desires of the users, who find themselves in the thrall of a top-down content offering.
Compare this to MySpace. It seems clear to outsiders that MySpace was built with no thought of how to manage third party widgets within the site. On the one hand, this opened up access and spawned a vast and fertile industry as the power of add ons and plug ins became clear. On the other hand, it left MySpace with no method of controlling or benefitting from (exerting tolls) this inrush of unsanctioned colonisers. The users obviously really liked having access to all this stuff, but they also hated not having a simple way to manage it. Widget developers were happy to watch their widgets go viral within the system, but hated being at the mercy of MySpace's efforts to control access. MySpace became the poster boy for rampant growth and broken or absent API. Something had to give.
The thing that gave was Facebook, obviously. They always had a control freakery attitude to their space, but as they opened it up and watched what was happening at MySpace (and other places), it must have occured to them that there was a better way to do things. So they rolled out their own f8 API, which allows supposed unfettered access to the platform, while actually building in total control for the longer term. This has gone down rather well: the flow of Facebook apps is huge (and if you talk to any developers out there, it's clear that the deluge has only just started, there's plenty more in the pipeline). So Facebook has benefited in the short term by watching what happened at MySpace and coming up with a more sensible approach.
However, it would be a crazy world (and Rupert Murdoch wouldn't be part of it) if MySpace hadn't been watching and learning from all of this and preparing their own response. After all, it's not really about the environment. It's not about the tools. It's not about the membership. In the short term, it's purely about the mindshare. Where the zeitgeist thinks the action is. At the moment it's at Facebook. Now, I get shot down each time I say that Facebook isn't the be all and end all of social spaces, but my point really is this: it's just too early to know. And we're too close to it to judge. So expect something clever from MySpace before the year's out.
And what about Bebo? Well, take a visit, and see what they've come up with for their members.
Read/WriteWeb
