I’ve spoken with Ryan Healy about his post on how we all work for Facebook and some continued thought has sparked on my end regarding application developers (and us as users, which is more toward the bottom). One such thing in particular is the relatively kind phrase attributed to Facebook of “Walled Garden” when referring to its Application Platform. When you really look at it, I think a better phrase may be “serfdom”. They give you your plot of land with which you can do as wish so long as its within their framework, constraints, and report to them. At any given time, they may decide to change the way things work, too.
Now, there is evidence to some potential change. Facebook is supporting Bebo’s efforts to clone the Facebook platform so FB applications can run on Bebo as well. Maybe Facebook is growing more open, giving their serfs (application developers) more land for a good cause or are maybe they simply expanding their boarders. It will be nice for the developers either way.
In considering Ryan’s post more, the same idea applies to us as users of Facebook. We’ve been given our space and that’s all we get. We have as many tools as we could want (and can even build more) to build up our little plot of land as much as possible, which is exactly what Facebook wants. User generated content. It takes a lot of oppression to leave the land you’ve built and the social system you’ve become a part of. That’s why even given all the squabbling over Facebook’s Beacon it ultimately lead to very little user action.
But now there is something interesting coming into the mix. Not just on Facebook, but the user generated content realm in general. While 1,500 Facebook users decided to try and monetize their profile, I would say it’s not a user revolt (and may not catch fire). I don’t think that side of the fence will have any effect. Instead, what will have effect is Google testing revenue sharing with YouTube and placing revenue sharing in their new wiki-spinoff, Knol. It’s an interesting change that may happen on the content holder side since Google is pushing it. Rewarding people for the effort they put into generating content. Not a bad idea. Although the question of sharing advertising revenue on that space comes into play when as a commenter on Ryan’s post keenly pointed out- what if a brand doesn’t want to be associated with the drunken pictures and lame quotes on someones Facebook profile?
None the less, a new trend in business models may emerge from this. I think it would be one for the better, personally. Reason being, and I could be off, but if sites begin to share revenue with their users as a means of being a free site and rewarding them for their content, then I think to strike a balance there may be a separate shift into charging users a premium for the use of the platform (rather than revenue sharing). Overall premium (freemium works as well) isn’t a bad model. Flickr uses the freemium model, and there was a survey that reported how such might turn out if YouTube used a similar model (100m in revenue). I could go on, but based on previous posts, it ought to be obvious I have a thing for revenue models that differ from [solely] advertising.