Mike Butcher – back at TechCrunch UK, I’m happy to see – writes an interesting post about “London’s Facebook frenzy”, citing its amazing UK membership and development boom. It’s undeniable that Facebook an extraordinary thing, and that it’s winning enthusiasm from the most unlikely people (and places).

But I wish developers and marketeers moving in on these services wouldn’t immediately over-egg the hype.

We had it with Second Life – never as interesting or potentially disruptive as Faceboook – where it was described to me by one UK developer, with a straight face, as a platform that would soon become “bigger than the web”. Bobbins. But fair enough, I guess – he must have been making a fortune from all the corporate work coming his way.

Anyway, despite SL’s bubble of hype now rapidly deflating, we’re seeing a repeat of that hype. Mike quotes Toby Beresford, a leading UK Facebook developer, saying:

“Now you can get away with a pure Facebook play. If your target market is consumer web, then you would have to be crazy to develop for anything else.”

Really? Are old-fashioned consumer websites now the preserve only of the “crazy”? Damn – just as we figured out how to make them pay, too…

It would be a shame if that attitude became popular. It’s not just that Facebook, while big now, may still find the social world can be a flighty one, and that the excitement may move elsewhere. It’s also that there aren’t nearly enough consumer web startups in the UK.

What would really be crazy, surely, would be to see the number reduced further, in favour of developing for a semi-open system where business models are unclear, and which still serves only a portion of the potential web audience that exists outside Facebook’s partially walled garden.

Facebook apps are fun, yes, and some talented developers will do well doing clever things for clients keen to do more to interact with their customers in a social environment. But the apps only exist because Facebook realised this semi-openness lets them capture value from other people’s work. Facebook apps are not the web, and they’re not a business.


COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS

At last! Someone else who doesn’t believe that Facebook is the centre of the universe! Couldn’t agree more, although I’ve really suffered from people having a go at me when I express any doubts at all as to Facebook’s supremacy. Personally, I can’t see what makes Facebook so special – its hype cycle may have a higher amplitude and a longer frequency, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to stick at the top forever. Uncomfortable blurring of the lines between social/business, disturbing privacy leaks, and the potential (and to my mind, probable) migration of teenagers/students away from a tool that they once felt was theirs but which is now infested with the very adults they were trying to get away from – all these things could push Facebook down the leeward slope of the hype cycle at any time.

Anyone that focuses their business just on Facebook and ignores the wider web is an idiot.

Suw thought this on Sep 21 07 at 10:18 am

Sadly you are guilty of the same hype. Why exactly did you believe what Facebook people told you about Facebook in the first place? Who ever said it was the centre of the universe apart from saddo publicists or new media polemicists? When is online media ever going to get over itself? This is NME syndrome: puff ‘em up and slap ‘em down…

Charlie Beckett thought this on Sep 27 07 at 8:53 pm

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