Facebook To Move Beyond Social Networking
The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook will make a major announcement later this week at the Facebook F8 event in San Francisco. The WSJ claims that the announcement will feature the launch of “Facebook Platform,” a new tool designed to turn Facebook into an open platform which any service provider can leverage.
According to the WSJ Facebook hopes the new service will allow users to “gain access to that content inside Facebook.” As to what the details will look like or what they announcement means for users, the WSJ doesn’t say and Facebook has not yet publicly commented.
The WSJ does speculate a little on what the Facebook Platform might entail:
For instance, an online retailer could build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they’ve already established on the site. Or a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook.
If the Journal’s sources are correct, it sounds like Facebook is making a move into a couple of already crowded markets — personalized homepages and recommendation services.
The homepage market especially will put Facebook up against some big players like the recently revamped iGoogle.
The WSJ quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying, “We realize that we’re not going to be able to build everything ourselves here, and it’s not the most efficient thing for us to do that.”
Zuckerberg also added that allowing others to build services which interact with Facebook is “definitely going to be a bigger part of our strategy.”
Regular readers will know that we at Compiler love us some APIs, and it certainly sounds like an expansion of the Facebook API could be in the works.
Be sure to check back later in the week when Facebook officially unveils its new offerings.
