{"id":2151,"date":"2008-01-25T12:59:22","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/01\/25\/facebook-the-startup-sandbox\/"},"modified":"2008-01-25T12:59:22","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:59:22","slug":"facebook-the-startup-sandbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/01\/25\/facebook-the-startup-sandbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook: The startup sandbox"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it’s a bit much to be calling Facebook’s platform the “new social operating system,” but then I guess when your blog is called Knowledge@Wharton you kind of have to pump things up a bit<\/a>. What I do think has been happening is that more and more companies are treating it as a kind of sandbox for ideas — a place to try out a small feature or even a full-fledged app, to see whether there’s enough response to make it an actual business, or to seed an actual business.<\/p>\n

You can see this happening with all kinds of different companies: Alec Saunders is doing a kind of online podcast\/conference call to publicize the free-conference-calling app<\/a> that he and his team at Iotum in Ottawa have put together; my new friend David Gratton from Project Opus in Vancouver has an app called MixxMaker that is a kind of proof-of-concept<\/a> for a music-sharing technology; and along the same lines, Ian Andrew Bell of Something Simpler in Vancouver recently told me about his app, Pul.se, which is a kind of recommendation engine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m sure there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other examples. As more than one person has pointed out, however, getting so firmly attached to the Facebook economy can be a Catch-22: you start your app there in order to experiment and gain users, but then once you gain enough to make it worthwhile, you are stuck fast to Facebook<\/a> and it’s hard to end a symbiotic relationship like that. Companies such as iLike eventually decided to hitch their wagon entirely to Facebook and de-emphasize the standalone service. But is that a wise decision?<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

Pema Hagen, a co-founder of GigPark, mentions in the comments here that they just launched their Facebook app<\/a> last night. GigPark is a social recommendation engine for goods and services. And this news could make developing apps for Facebook even more appealing: the site is apparently making the F8 platform part of its API, so apps could theoretically be made to run anywhere.<\/p>\n

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I think it’s a bit much to be calling Facebook’s platform the “new social operating system,” but then I guess when your blog is called Knowledge@Wharton you kind of have to pump things up a bit. What I do think has been happening is that more and more companies are treating it as a kind … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Facebook: The startup sandbox”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}