Brad Feld>Fred Wilson>Me

Fred Wilson posted about “The Facebook Problem” in response to Brad Feld’s concern about Facebook’s new Application layer not showing much immediate benefit for those developers building applications.

Brad Says: “In the absence of [ad-revenue sharing], Facebook is going to need to address the “value to the apps developer” quickly, before some of the larger apps vaporize due to the developer saying “I’m not willing to keep paying for servers and bandwidth.” “

Fred Says: “I see a different Facebook problem. Invite overload and application noise. I cannot keep track of all the invites I am getting, both the standard invites and the application invites. And what’s worse, I can’t keep track of all the applications that all of my friends are using.

We all know I am not the Facebook generation. So maybe I am just not capable of dealing with this level of social networking. But I bet that many of the members of the Facebook generation are secretly wishing for the old Facebook where it was more about them and their friends and less about being a social operating system.”

In response to Brad I brought up the success of iLike: 6m total users in 8 mo. More than 4m have come in the last month, most from their facebook application. Their CEO is not worried about monetization. In an interview he said “There’s no way we’d try to fight an uphill battle against what’s best for the consumer. And fortunately, in contrast to the precariously-balanced “Myspace widget ecosystem,” making $ on the FB platform is no harder than making $ on our own site.”

In Response to Fred I drafted a comment, which I shortened and posted to his blog. That comment turned into this post:

I suppose that unfortunately, I’m in the “Facebook Generation,” I have 3 thoughts that may contribute some value to this discussion.

1) I resisted facebook for awhile, thinking it was silly. One of my friends tagged a photo of me and that was enough value to join. I just throw on a “noise” filter and it’s very nice. I can keep up with people I met while traveling in Europe, or from high school, from my hometown, etc. I ignore everything else and after 5 hours I’d found all those I wanted to find. Now all things I want to see get emailed to me (I made plans for tonight and saw a friend was coming home while drafting and proofreading this comment), and management takes very little time. Applications increase the level of information I can see about my friends. Nothing regarding them gets pushed to me though, it’s just there when I seek it out. I like this.

2) Quote Generator, Free Gift, Pets – I agree these are fluff applications with little value other than social interaction for social interactions sake. This helps college kids have sex, it will always exist! BUT, facebook exists as the primary online brand for most of my peers. 10% of my network have websites/blogs (most also have facebook or other social profiles), 75-80% of my network has a facebook or a myspace page. I have a desire to define myself online, so I’m redesigning my website to continue to house my blog and also use widgets to converge all my major online published material and control the presentation of it. Facebook Apps like last.fm, del.icio.us, twitter, etc. are essentially widgets and allow that 80% of my network to exercise similar control over there definition/brand online as those who code their own website/blog. If you doubt the value of widgets to some people, just look at the sidebar of Fred Wilson’s Blog. Of course not all 80% of my network that uses facebook find widgets useful, but more than the 10% that also run personal sites/blogs will have use for widgets. This brings me to my third idea.