Facebook opened its platform to outside developers in May, and four months later my profile has accumulated eleven applications I never meant to install, most of them arriving as a notification asking me to send a virtual drink, adopt a virtual pet, or compare something with a friend who already sent me the same request last Tuesday.
That is the part everyone complains about, and the complaints are fair. A large share of what has been built on this platform exists purely to propagate itself, using the same viral mechanics that made chain email obnoxious a decade ago, except now it runs inside a network people actually check every day.
What gets less attention is that the same mechanism is also the reason the platform is working at all.
An application that spreads itself by nagging your friends is annoying, and it is also, by definition, distribution nobody had to pay for. A developer with almost no marketing budget can put something in front of millions of people within days, provided it’s compelling enough that people forward it rather than dismiss it. That trade did not exist anywhere else in software before this year.
So the landscape splits cleanly in two. On one side, an enormous volume of low-effort applications built purely to generate notifications, most of which will be dead within a year once people learn to ignore them. On the other, a smaller number of genuinely useful things, calendars, photo tools, small games with actual design behind them, riding the exact same distribution mechanism to reach an audience that would otherwise have cost real money to acquire.
The interesting question is whether Facebook can tell the two apart faster than users get tired of both.
There is also money circling this that has nothing to do with any of the applications. I keep hearing that Microsoft is negotiating to buy a small stake at a valuation that would make this five-year-old company worth more than most media conglomerates, based on user growth and engagement numbers rather than anything resembling current profit.
I don’t know whether that deal closes on the terms being discussed, but I know what it would mean if it does. It would mean the market has decided the social graph itself, independent of any single application running on top of it, is the asset worth pricing. Which is a strange thing to conclude about a company whose most visible recent achievement is a wave of applications that ask you to send your friends a drink.