blog.pmarca.com: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it -- networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. -- and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition....just like if you built a web app that succeeded outside Facebook, of course.

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However, what Facebook is now doing is a lot more sophisticated than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information. And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

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In this post, I provide an overview and analysis of the Facebook Plaform and what we have learned about it in the three weeks since it launched.

To start, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.

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Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.

Definitionally, a "platform" is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

In contrast, an "application" is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

The classic example of an application being vanquished by a platform was the Wang word processor versus Microsoft DOS-based personal computers.

Wang word processors -- the application, in this case -- were highly evolved, fantastically successful dedicated word processing systems that owned their market, until the general-purpose PC came along. While the PC at first was inferior at word processing, within a few years of its launch the fact that outside developers had built thousands of applications for it -- like spreadsheets -- that closed Wang word processors could not match, coupled with steadily improving PC-based word processing software like Wordstar, had all but killed the Wang word processor. Wang -- one of the most succcessful technology companies of the 1970's -- went bankrupt not long after.

This is a story whose moral has historically not been embraced by the web industry to nearly the extent one would have thought.

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And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

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a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

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First, perhaps the most architecturally interesting aspect of the Facebook platform is the fact that everything routes through Facebook's servers.

This is known as a "proxy" model -- you interact with a third-party Facebook application by interacting with Facebook's servers which turn interact with the application's servers.

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Second, Facebook has really thought through the API suite it provides to developers.

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Third, there are three very powerful potential aspects of being a platform in the web era that Facebook does not embrace.

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Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, when your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.

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Unless you're already operating your own systems at Facebook levels of scale, your servers will promptly explode from all the traffic and you will shortly be sending out an email like this.

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In closing:

Congratulations to the Facebook team -- big time! -- for an amazing leap forward in what the Internet can do for real users and for opening up whole new vistas of opportunities for third-party developers.

This is an amazing achievement -- one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade.

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