Investment Playground.NET

I’m truly fascinated by Facebook and its other insignificant predecessors.

Personally - I hate the whole notion of having people that I don’t want to keep in contact with know my “bio” or “profile” and any info about me. Twitter’s another example. Why on Earth would I want people to know everything I’m doing on a minute by minute basis. Loopt, MySpace, Friendster - I just don’t see the logic.

But big business transcends “logic”. Regardless of my personal feelings - I sincerely believe the future is going to lie in social networks based solely through the computer and mobile phone.

I joined Facebook this weekend. I already have people writing on my Wall, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. But what I find so intriguing is the applications. Open source development: code word for anybody can build a piece of software to put on the site. What a brilliant idea.

So instead of Facebook programmers sitting in the war room trying to keep up with demand for more and more applications, quite contrarily they’ve decided to let the world create their own applications. And the world releases them for free on Facebook, achieving revenue through indirect methods (people who like the application request more, advertising revenue, etc). Essentially, the Facebook programmers have hired the world for a discount fare.

I don’t know enough to write a good solid case study quite yet. But I do know one thing that can be a “lesson learned” from all of this:

• Fill an existing void and let the customers declare what they want.
• Give customers the illusion of freedom.
• Give customers a sense of ownership.

This is a loose take-away, I’m open to comments as always.