Over the last couple of years I’ve come across a lot of services that had network externalities tied to it. SMS messaging, it’s no fun if there’s no one to text back. Facebook, what’s the point unless you’re seeing pictures and getting updates from people you care about? And most recently twitter. Okay I’ve blogged enough about Twitter, so this isn’t another post about twitter per se.
This is about platforms platform. Things are being built on top of twitter. I rarely use the twitter web interface to interact with twitter, I user tweetdeck, I used twitterfox in the past and I’ll probably use a couple of other tools. In fact businesses are being built around twitter, like stocktwits which, according to the WSJ is going to start charging users 20 USD/ month. Howard Lindzon’s a smart guy, he’s started and sold businesses before, and I trust this will probably be another win for Howard.
Facebook is also trying to be a platform, opening up Facebook connect so users can login to sites using their Facebook login is a pretty sweet move. A lot of sites are already incorporating this technology and I’m sure others are all over this. There are also a number of businesses that are trying to leverage facebook’s platform capabilities.
The iPhone, Blackberry, Google and yes Yahoo! too are all trying to open up to applications and become platforms. It’s a very cool movement but I think it’s one that’s not completely understood yet. Like network effects, where you need people to be using the channel to make it a worthwhile experience, application effects mean that you need a number of smart, cool interactions before the platform is legitimate and not just trying to be a platform.
Window’s did this extremely well in the 80s when so many applications were built to work on Windows. It will be interesting to see which platforms app developers will chose to be the success stories of the next ten years. There’s been a lot of discussion, analysis and work done on the effect of network effects but I can’t really see a lot of work on application effects, would be great to see some analysis and theory on what makes a platform application worthy.
