Living in a digital world

Following the formal launch of Facebook Platform at the end of last month, a wide range of third-party software developers have now launched applications which integrate seamlessly (more or less) with the personalised homepages or ‘Profiles’ set-up by each of the 25m+ users of the Facebook social networking website.

Facebook Platform is essentially a toolkit which allows third-parties to develop apps. which integrate directly with Facebook’s core functions. This means they can reach right into your Facebook data and use it to tell you things like how many of your Facebook friends are also using the same app. Plus, as soon as you add an app. it is noted in your friends’ news streams from which they can then add or interact with it themselves.

Of particular interest from a marketing point of view is the fact that these new apps. can also serve their own ads and conduct transactions direct with their users. A nice example of the latter being ‘Causes’, which lets you invite friends to join campaigns for charities – including making donations – and then ranks users based on number of supporters recruited and value of donations raised.

Look-out for a proliferation of such apps. coming from companies and charities alike – all keen to tap into the commercial opportunities offered by the fast-growing network of Facebook members.

So, for consumers, Facebook Platform means that there are now a growing range of interesting, useful, and plain daft applications that you can add to the previously rather sparse and clean default Facebook Profile.

For marketers, it means that we now have a new opportunity to engage directly with these consumers within their chosen social network space – including securing financial transactions.

While, for anyone placing bets on the race to be top social network site, it’s also worth highlighting that the functional richness of apps. made possible by the ‘deep integration’ now offered by Facebook is in stark contrast to that currently available to developers of MySpace widgets. A key difference that is fundamental to Facebook’s future growth strategy.

In the words of its 23-year old Chief Exec., Mark Zuckerberg, by opening itself up to developers in this way Facebook is positioning itself as a “social operating system” for the Internet.

A very bold statement which led the New York Times to comment that Facebook is “Looking to sit at the centre of its users’ online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC”.