Competition @ Internet Speed

Mark Cuban recently wrote, The Internet is dead and boring, while no doubt the underlying technologies of the web are are in a stable mode and unlikely to radically change in the near future. While we ait for http 3 or IPVx, the world ought to realise that a lot of additional value can come out of what we currently loosely define as the internet platforms. Some of them are the the modern wonders of the world/Marc Andreesen recently wrote about the internet platforms.

Umair picks up issues with facebook, the hottest name in the internet today.He argues that Facebook/F8 - is not a platform and the worldwide web is the platform - and every site or widget on it is also an open platform. His reasoning:

In yesterday's platform economy, scale in complements + technological specificity drove huge switching costs. But today, there is no hard technological lock-in - and it's very, very hard to create it. Let's say we create a closed standard. And we gain demand-side scale. He sees that Facebook has built a pseudo-platform. He is right that such platforms create no real entry barriers and switching costs can’t limit entry. As if taking the cue, Techcrunch
points out that facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications. The internet economy is indeed amazing.

Labels: Emerging Trends, Facebook, Internet Platforms

Facebook Source Code Leaked

Techcrunch breaks the news that some parts of facebook code appears to have been leaked. Facebook is the new darling of the web 2.0/ social network movement and is clearly a high profile player in the segment. Naturally, it has become a magnet for attacks against its systems. This is shocking to say the least. Nik Cubrilovicpoints to number of clear ramifications here. The first is that the code can be used by outsiders to better understand how the Facebook application works, for the purposes of finding further security holes or bugs that could be exploited. Since Facebook is a closed source application, without access to the code security holes are usually found through a process of black-box testing, whereby an external party will probe the application in an attempt to work out how the application behaves and to try and find potential race conditions. In closed source applications it is common that developers rely on the closed nature of the application to obfuscate poor design elements and the structure of the application. An attacker getting access to the source code more often than not leads to further security holes being discovered. The second implication with this leak is that the source code reveals a lot about the structure of the application, and the practices that Facebook developers follow. From just this single page of source code a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform.
Brandee Barker of Facebook responds that some of Facebook’s source code was exposed to a small number of users due to a bug on a single server that was misconfigured and then fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.
In the past giants like Microsoft , Cisco have suffered from source code leaks. Both of them rallied back quite well. I agree with Nik that this leak is not good news for Facebook, as it raises the question of how secure a Facebook users private data really is. If the main source code for a site can be leaked, then it can be said that almost anything is possible. Most large scale applications suffer a breach at some point or another, since the odds are always stacked in favor of attackers, but companies can respond in a number of ways and the hope here is that Facebook will handle this situation gracefully.

Labels: Emerging Trends, Facebook, Source Code Leaks

The Rising Facebook Frenzy

Christopher Beam writes that if Facebook adds e-mail, IM, and RSS, it's one step closer to becoming as comprehensive as Yahoo! and as popular as MySpace. The rest of the Internet might as well surrender.I wrote about the Facebook phenomenon a few days back.
With the Facebook platform in vogue, outside developers will fall over themselves to deliver great content to Facebook users. The site's growing audience, sterling reputation, and clean look are catnip for corporations. Marc Andreessen points out that veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win. He explains,

"platform" is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers - users - and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate. In contract an application cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

Fellow irregular Jeff Nolan writes about the new distribution ecosystem play that Facebook is pioneering. Facebook plans to add a "wallet" feature for processing online payments. But for the site to really take off, it needs to have an instant messaging system as easy to use as Google's, as well as an embeddable inbox that connects to Hotmail, Yahoo!, and the like. says christopher. The fact that Facebook hasn't introduced some sort of RSS feed for news—real news, not News Feed news—also borders on inexcusable, he argues - a point which, I fully agree with.

Mark elaborates that Facebook's viral distribution mechanism by which users became instantly aware of which applications their friends are using, can with one click start using those applications, and automatically spread them to their friends is the killer there. Happening in an environment with 24 million active users -- active users defined as users active on the site in the last 30 days. 50% of active users return to the site daily. 100,000 new users join per day. 45 billion page views per month and growing. 50 million users, and a lot more page views, predicted by the end of 2007. An application that takes off on Facebook is very quickly adopted by hundreds of thousands, and then millions - in days! - and then ultimately tens of millions of users.

The API’s released by most other players have mostly been for interacting with a web system from the outside, with limited abilities for . programmability and customizability enabled by a true platform – this makes a huge difference. In a recent meeting , I heard someone saying that MySpace is the next Microsoft and here comes the view that Facebook could overtake Google or Yahoo. I wont endorse either of the points, but I do think that Facebook has the potential to become big. Once cal also expect an IPO from them –that would be followed by buyouts of its competitors by other players or it can also buy players operating in proximate space,. The facebbok frenzy, for sure would create lasting impact in the world of social networks.

Labels: Emerging Technologies, Emerging Thoughts, Emerging Trends, Facebook, Social Networks

The Facebook Phenomenon

It looks like that the Facebook Frenzy is at its peak now. With the flexibility for third-party companies and developers enables to create custom applications for Facebook members to add to their profiles, building "Facebook apps" has become a top priority for many Web companies-particularly smaller ones looking to make it big by capitalizing on Facebook's large and loyal user base. Already we are hearing views that less than a month after its debut, however, Facebook Platform may be closing in on a saturation point. However, I must sya that the Facebook penetration in the market is happening very fast indeed. In this web 2.0 age, perhaps growth needs to be assessed perhaps on a daily basis? Courtesy of Rajesh saw this lovely comparison between Facebook & MySpace. The article concludes that Facebook in the clear winner in the comparison shootout. Talking of the comparison, it must be recognized that MySpace rapidly grew to be the largest site on the internet in terms of page views. In less than 3 years it surpassed yahoo in traffic volumes. Obviously to manage this fast growth, they’ve had to deal with scaling problems and their focus seems to be in slowly and steadily fixing the errors/server problems. Perhaps they are now working on new features and right now indications are that MySpace is atleast three times larger that Facebook world wide. Clearly we can expect to see some far reaching things happening in this space.

Labels: Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends, Facebook