The internet field of dreams represents the power of appealing to and talking with and selling to millions of people -- in a space, on a platform through a way that simply did not exist several years ago.
What do I mean? From Reuters, I saw that Facebook.com at f8 just announced this past week plans to allow it to become a software operating system for all sorts of Internet media and said it has signed up 65 partners, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., to build Web applications within Facebook.
The company is transforming itself from a Web site into a "platform" that will allow developers to build services that work both inside Facebook's site and on their own independent sites.
"Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we're going to end that," Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old CEO, told a gathering of software developers. Half of Facebook users, or 12 million people daily check the site to see what their friends are saying and doing.
Facebook can become a central clearinghouse for software developers, borrowing a few pages from the decades-old strategy playbooks of Microsoft or IBM, while retaining the flexibility of the new generation of Web-delivered services.The Palo Alto, California-based company has created a new Web programming language of its own called Facebook Markup, a variant of the basic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding that underlies all Web pages, with a few special features. Independent developers can sell ads or incorporate tools for conducting online transactions and keep all the resulting revenue.
The marketing souk just got bigger. The ability to capture proprietary sales got deeper.
Also, clothing sales just surpassed electronic sales on the web.
When we talk about the power of word of mouth, Facebook just kicked this approach into hyper-drive for its partners and for people who talk to people they like and trust. That's real warp speed.
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