The UnSub

The Facebook virus has finally hit Singapore. My initial skeptism led me to wonder why on earth would Microsoft valuate FB at such a pricetag. I had an account but didn’t really bothered with it since I assumed it was just another Friendster where people are just into bloating the number of friends. At most it’s just another avenue for people to spam you with nonsensical games and invites.

Boy I was wrong! After some exploration, I can see why some people are addicted to it. Every aspect of the system has viral elements. Users like novelty, users like to connect, users are curious. Now I can really see why developers are flocking to FB. The other social networks are merely subsets of FB. Meaning to say, what Friendster, MySpace or LinkedIn can do (was surprised that Mr Yu added me, wonder what he thinks of FB), FB can provide it via appz plug-ins third party developers.

The feature set of a typical web application is limited by the number of programmers working on it. FB does not have this limitation. The possibilities are only limited by what usability web technology has to offer now, FB’s API and developers’ imagination.

There are a couple of cool apps such as Visual Bookshelf, Flog and a couple that I really like. Take Visual Bookshelf for example, apart from knowing what my friends are reading, it is possible to link to Amazon which may ultimately lead to a transaction. It may not the case for Singaporeans to buy off Amazon, but I am sure somewhere else on the globe does.

It does make alot of sense now why Microsoft wants a piece of FB. Even the concept of Social Operating System begins to make alot of sense now (RT readers pls start re-thinking about identity in a consumer space). The model is no longer “charging the users” but the developers and entreprises that want to latch on to it. It being the Social Operating System.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under Internet, Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.