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Connect is more of an opportunity for existing sites which have so far been unable to capitalise on Facebook at all. Perhaps I've misinterpreted who you're referring to as 'developers'.
The Facebook Platform has been dying a slow, intentional death ever since Facebook realized it was a strategic mistake. The profile redesign was just the final nail in the coffin.
The key driver behind the Platform was distribution, from top to bottom. Connect reduces the cost of acquisition, which is a part of distribution, but there's no news feed behind it.
Now the platform requires some quality and thoughtfulness in its applications for them to become popular and viral. It also requires some rejiggering of existing apps and widgets to take advantage of the new opportunities the platform provides but most don't want to do that.
I think as we see more apps built with these new features (e.g. The Publisher) in mind, apps will become more successful. Some old ones will never be able to surpass where they were before, others will do even better because of the new design.
I've never seen FB apps as anything but web sites, viewed via FB, so I think it is exactly the same group of developers. Everyone will need to re-do their product thinking for the world of having "to build a real web site," but too bad. life's tough.
@Steve if your situation means that slow, high quality growth is right for you -- proceed as you are. If you've got mouths to feed or investors to satisfy, what you are suggesting won't work.
@Jess au contraire! Connected web sites can push off-FB events into the feeds of their FB authenticated users. i missed that for a while, but it is (as you inadvertantly indicate ), exactly the point.
Anyhow, didn't know that. I guess it's like Version 1 of the Platform, which allowed authentication via FB, plus the better parts of Beacon.
The "boxes" tab is definitely a ghetto, though.
The growth opportunity is not in Facebook Connect but in OpenSocial: there are new OpenSocial containers every month (Netlog and Friendster in september), making social applications available to new users, with a total reach of 375 million users today.
These social site's user base are located in different geographies: hi5 in South America, Orkut in Brazil and India, Friendster in Asia, Netlog in Europe, so you need to localize your app.
Or they have a different type of user base, like professional social networks Viadeo, Xing and LinkedIn: there are opportunities to build a different type of social apps in these environments.
Your best investment today as a social app developer is to port your app to OpenSocial, localize it and deploy it to all the networks that support it. Networks like hi5 and Netlog have systems in place where they will do the localization for you.
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Patrick Chanezon
OpenSocial evangelist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLAkUHK1lNs
youtube.com/watch?v=iLAkUHK1lNs
I personally think that this just a temporary setback for Facebook and that it should get up to speed again. In South Africa it is just starting out. Now only if Twitter do not take over the whole scene getting them to sign up with twitter before they know what facebook is - now then I suppose they will suffer huge traffic loss.
All I can see that they can do id to bring out a huge FireFox Plugin that stays open on their profile all the time...
The big question is now that the honeymoon's over (and by that I mean the novelty of having 6000 friends and biting them all to turn them into zombies) how do we use the platform to ADD VALUE to these subscribers (READ: Make it worth their while to communicate with the brand via that platform) and in turn convert them to consumers and advocates?
For me, it's not about using the latest, greatest platform but rather making use of all of them. The wider the net is cast the better your chances of catching the fish...and if you make the holes the right size and shape, you'll get just the fish you want.
But that is because he hasn't gone to the trouble of adapting to those changes in Facebook Platform.
Apps that want to survive need to reinvent themselves. That's a big thing to ask, and many developers will not have the resources to do so. OK, that makes the cost of building on the Platform higher than we first thought, but it does not in itself mean that new and engaging apps will find the Platform dead.
http://blog.lookery.com/2008/10/21/the-facebook...