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I knew Justin Smith over at Inside Facebook was a pretty smart guy, but he just blew me out of the water with his recent post Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the new SEO. It's effin' brilliant.
If you thought my piece last week on Marketing Facebook Apps was anywhere close to on target, then you better darn well read his stuff... it's a hundred times more thoughtful than my earlier analysis. And his thoughts on optimizing the News Feed as a parallel to search engine optimization are right on target.
I expect we will quickly see a whole new viral metrics & viral marketing optimization industry emerge due to social networking (if not Facebook exclusively), mirroring the rise of SEM/SEO over the past 5 years due to Google & Yahoo. I bet Slide & RockYou & HotOrNot & Ning are looking at it closely.
What is blowing me away on all of this is that it's happening at lightspeed: this stuff has come down in just the past 3-6 months. When i went to a Facebook open house back in February, i had the barest inkling of what was about to happen. Since the launch of Platform under a few months ago, the world has turned upside down. Every startup, VC, and platform company i talk to has Facebook on the brain (or if they don't, they've got their head up their ass). There are 25 apps on Facebook with 1M+ users, and ~100 apps with over 100,000 users. Renkoo's business model went from dustbin to greenfield in less than 3 weeks (Booze Mail is at 350,000 users as of this morning). The blogosphere has exploded with discussions on Facebook in the past few weeks. I had my highest traffic blog week ever last week... by a factor of five. It's incredible.
I've been talking to people lately about how Facebook Platform is the most important thing that's happened on the Internet in the past five years, possibly the past ten... surpassing the development of AdWords and the birth of social networking in general. People sort of look at me like i'm stoned / crazy, but i don't think so (okay, maybe the latter... but i quit toking over 20 years ago). Now we're about to see it get even more amazing. The emergence of a whole ecosystem of new apps built on the social graph is just over the horizon.
We're not in the middle of Bubble 2.0 -- rather, we're in the middle of Renaissance 2.0. Northern California is Italy. Palo Alto is Florence. San Francisco is Venice. Sequioa Capital (or Peter Thiel & Reid Hoffman) are the Medicis. Ev, Biz, Ben, Mena, Matt & Toni are the Gutenbergs. And Mark Zuckerburg is Da Vinci. Bene, molto bene :)
More Startups. More Jobs.
Lovely pumping Dave. ;)
In all seriousness, I think the Facebook platform is hot stuff. It's a ways from being the hottest thing in the past 5 or 10 years, imho. The more I think about Facebook apps, the more functionality I wish they would expose.
The deeper they get, the more power that is exposed. I look forward to seeing what they do with the platform within the next 6 months. Definitely exciting times.
Posted by: Peter C | Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 09:06 PM
Oh, one more thing. There's this idea I've been playing with, in my head, that I'm hoping Facebook would do. They've been talking a lot about the large number of searches done on their website. So far, the only real purpose I can see for it is user, group and application search.
I would like they to create the first, real social-networking search engine. I'm not even sure what it means yet ;P but I bet it would be awesome. If they ever managed to take advantage of all that structured data, maybe I could eventually find a decent barber near me or a good mediterranean place in Mountain View.
Posted by: Peter C | Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 09:14 PM
I think Facebook is kind of like a black hole. Why? Because a lot of the internet is going to get sucked into it.While I enjoy the apps I have installed, such as Slide and ILike, the real beauty is that I don't *have* to go to these sites to utilize some of the social aspects of their main site. I think apps certainly diminish the pageview metric considerably (something that has been talked about a lot recently).
It will be interesting to see how the Web 1.0 companies latch on to the Facebook platform...
Posted by: Damon Billian | Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 04:43 AM
Interesting post, as I pointed out in IF what sucks for the app makers is the simple point that I can block each and every news feed post.
Posted by: Devin Reams | Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 02:38 PM
Viral marketing is the wave of the future. I think that is where online marketing is going to go.
Posted by: Fred333 | Tuesday, January 08, 2008 at 06:24 AM