@seth

At the end of July, roughly two months following the opening of Facebook’s social media platform, I wrote that “Closed is the New Open.” I anticipated that Facebook would enable tremendous innovation by virtue of how few options it provided for expression as opposed to how many. In the roughly two months since, developers have harvested the Facebook social graph to create a veritable rain forest of myriad applications.

The original sin of social media may be remembered by future generations as the moment when poke and wall exposed themselves at the Facebook Platform F8 event in SF on May 24, 2007.  Against the backdrop of an open social graph API, these core functions suddently enabled 3rd parties to create entirely new forms of social interaction: “Who do you want to XXX now?,” “Wanna send a XXX to your friend?,” “Who is XXXer?,” “What do you want to draw on your friend’s XXX?”

Platforms

A platform’s success is based on its generosity: how many sustainable applications have been built on said platform?

For an embodiment of a successful platform, cf Dave Morin, the authentic leader of Facebook’s technical platform. When you sit down with him, you are struck by his commitment to openness and providing all applications with a level playing field. He combines the intellect of an economist with the empathy of a sociologist. Any fear a developer may be wrestling with in terms of whether to base their business on Facebook, melts melts away in Morin’s disarming presence. You think to yourself, “Geez, sounds like these guys at Facebook are genuine- the platform is open.”

Applications take what the platform gives.

Applications

The success of an application is based on its ability to consume, to take, information from a platform and interpret it specifically for a user’s benefit. In media futures speak, the Facebook platform exposes an API which creative developers use to infuse their apps with a certain alchemical magic, otherwise known as engagement.

Perhaps the best personification of a successful application is Max Levchin, the intense, “nothing will stand between our engineers and N consumers” CEO of Slide. Slide is the biggest application suite on the Facebook platform. Max wastes little time at conferences educating others, as he seems to prefer notating on a whiteboard about optimizing viral growth paths. If Morin is like Jeff Sachs the world economist– working hard to reassure countries that he will promote free trade– then Levchin is like Dmitri Balyasny, the hedge fund trader who stays under the radar while managing vast money flows.

Advertising takes what the applications give.

Advertising

- D(["mb","\u003cbr /\>More than ten years ago in 1996 we saw the emergence of first generation ad servers and networks: focalink, netgravity, clickover, accipitor, flycast, and of course doubleclick. Call this advertising 1.0. These were basic tools for web sites to serve ads and for advertisers to purchase banner inventory. The media was "dumb" insofar as there little in the way of targetting, although the consumer experience was so new that response rates to banners were still extremely high.\u003cbr /\>\u003cbr /\>Starting in 2000, Overture and Google\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s adwords represented the next step forward by moving from a pure impression basis to a cpc basis. Ads could now be targetted based on the implicit "lookingforness" of the keyword.\u003cbr /\>Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T\u003c/div\>",0] ); D(["ce"]); //–>While apps take from the platform, they give to advertising. The 10-year procession of online advertising models from when banners first appeared in 1995 to today’s behavioral targeting, can be seen simply as an emerging ability for web sites to share more about what they know about their users with the advertisers that want to reach those same users. This is the apogee of what I shall describe as personal advertising, which is all forms of advertising that try to market to you based on who you are, what you have done, and what your commercial intentions may be. All advertising today, more or less, falls under this umbrella.

Recently, I have been working on a different kind of advertising, social advertising. This is when the ads you see aren’t simply influnced by your behavior, but in fact are driven by the behavior of those in your “friend group.” This was never possible before a social network such as Facebook enabled new kinds of applications that could carry social graph information up into the advertising layer of the online media stack. These kinds of ads take the value of rich data about social influence (which is extracted from the applications) and pays this value back to the underlying platform, which benefits in the form of increased CPM. I will have much more to show and tell about social advertising next week at the Web 2.0 conference. One thing that should be self evident is that the only forms of advertising that work inside of social media are social advertisements.

The most desperate attempts that personal advertising continues to make in order to capture my attention not withstanding:

* For a powerpoint-icized description of Social Advertising, see the brief presentation I gave at Dave McClure’s excellent Graphing Social conference this week