2007 Facebook launched their platform. Quickly applications were built that leveraged the communication tools on the Platform and apps became viral. Virility for developers isn’t a bad thing. Virility means users, it means page views, it means eye balls, it means investment dollars. As we prepare to close Q2 in 2008 - Facebook is clamping down the communication channels open to applications. Slide has said publicly that they will stop creating “viral” apps and focus on generating good content and monetizing the massive audience they’ve amassed. Early 2008 MySpace followed suit releasing an OpenSocial platform. Their strategy was to allow no viral channels to applications at launch (although they are slowing opening the valves). This effectively crippled applications that didn’t have nice hooks.

So as I’m sitting at Graphing Social Patterns East this week, listening to speakers discussing the future of this industry it makes me wonder. Is this the year where applications that actually “do” something will succeed? What is the measure of success for these non-mass adoption applications? Will the money flow to these smaller more niche audience applications? My prediction for this year is that with the launch of applications on LinkedIn and more of the social networking platforms is that applications that provide real value beyond the “poke” type applications will succeed. The only question that remains, will the money be there to support the developers as they venture out into this brave new world?

Tags: applications, future, gspeast, gspeast08

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under conferences, social networking. 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.