The buzz word for the second half of 2007 is: PLATFORM! Anything that wants to create some buzz has to have ‘platform’ in it somehow. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs went from doing simple apps that leveraged new programing techniques and the social graphs, to full blown Microsoft-killing conspiracy theories! Startups are realizing the true potential of their apps, and thinking in more general terms how they can create an ecosystem around it.
Some companies think that if they build a platform, suddenly they are going to get flooded with apps and those are going to ensure their existence, just like Windows, Office, Photoshop etc. Things have changed a lot since then.
How?
Well for starters now there’s a lot of platforms to build for: Mac, Win, Linux, web, cellphones etc…Back then, things were limited to just a couple of platforms. Since web apps are built on open standards and languages (except for FBQL) there’s really no developer lock-in. People use web services freely no matter what OS they’re on: so there’s no user lock-in. So having a bunch of apps in your ecosystem doesn’t really doesn’t matter in the web, since there are tens of other out there and migrating them would take very little time.
For a user choosing a platform to invest time boils down to the number of friends rather than app diversity. There are no “killer apps” for a particular platform…that is if you don’t count the facebook Zombie application which literally kill people.
OpenSocial will probably make it easier to build stuff on and end the facebook user and developer lock-in. Still a bit more of standardization is needed to ensure that the web and not some company is the platform.