With the early success of Facebook’s decision to open their site to development as a platform, instead of remaining a closed service, other social networks are forced to notice … and react. According to a Mashable post this week (tip o’ the hat to Pat Coyle, once again), LinkedIn—the professional and career networking site, whose focus is employment—is going to follow suit:
LinkedIn is feeling the heat from Facebook’s platform strategy: realizing it could lose its dominant position in business networking if it doesn’t act, founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman said on Friday that LinkedIn will provide open APIs “within 9 monthsâ€.
This is good news for everyone involved, most importantly the members of the LinkedIn community. Not every social network is going to benefit from an open platform development strategy. Indeed, not every company is even large and sophisticated enough to handle the support issues that come with it. Facebook appears to have been atypically adept at involving their future developers not only in making the platform effective but also in creating a developer-friendly API. A simple decision to is not always simple to implement. Facebook could easily have been critically hurt through third-party development if they had botched the delivery.
Facebook certainly has made a hyperleap forward, but the gap is not insurmountable or so proprietary as to make other Johnny-come-lately sites doomed to follow their lead. Facebook’s applications are wide-ranging. Many of them are simple hooks into other existing communities, and those success stories—like iLike—happen as much due to a good match between communities as an effective tool to make that connection. There are also plenty of meaningless apps that stand by themselves, like Food Fight and Pets (). Great ideas sometimes flop, like Trakzor. It boasts some 779,367 users, but few in my circle were using it rendering it useless. In fact, some saw its function of identifying those who view your profile as an intrusion and new barrier to use.
The success other social networks might enjoy by opening up access to their communities remains planted in the creation of meaningful connections. While you can certainly make career gains through Facebook, the founding mission of LinkedIn is built around career. The great Firefox plug-in for LinkedIn is an example of a connection working the other way, pulling up relevant connections in your network when the plug-in detects you have browsed to an employment-related page. For career-minded services and communities, this relationship might be leveraged as effectively by putting an app into the LinkedIn web site content.
HCI designers will find this is a doubly-constraining creative environment. Not only does one have to understand the end user, she also has to understand the relationship the design will have to the other apps in the community. In a complex world, where you cannot predict or control the other applications acting in the system, new and exciting things may emerge. The ideal apps will be created by designers who understand the dynamics of the platform enough to build in adaptive responses. The flip side to that extra degree of constraint is the expanded opportunities to put something into the world.
