Community Building in the Age of Facebook - Day 1

Today I attended the Web Community Forum's "Community Building in the Age of Facebook" conference here in Seattle. It featured panels and presentations by the rock stars of Facebook thought-leadership - it was well worth the $500 admission.

What struck me though was what I perceived as an myopic love of all things Facebook:
* The beacon feature recently was just poorly executed.
* There is no short term competition for Facebook.
* The worst thing about Facebook is their messaging features.

From my perspective, Facebook has done a lot of things right, and they potentially represent a good opportunity to raise awareness for Livemocha, but I approach their enthusiasm with a bit more skepticism.

When you're a hammer, everything's a nail...
... I've heard RIM CEO Jim Balsillie say this a couple of times and it seems to apply. It was a foregone conclusion that start ups should make Facebook a huge part of their product strategy (ie don't have a stand-alone destination site) and that advertising seemed to be the obvious place to monetize. I suppose it's unrealistic to expect people who have seen success on Facebook to talk you out of working with Facebook.

.... but what if Google makes good on their promise?
Google's Open Social announcement allows developers to write an application "once" and potentially share data between different "container sites" (Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, MySpace, and more). Of course this is currently an empty promise because OpenSocial won't be ready, I hear, until early next year.

If they execute well, OpenSocial:
* Has more users
* Inherently allows application developers to hedge their bets by developing simultaneously for multiple sites (rather than just Facebook).
* Allows "niche" social networks to better target and address user needs.

The Fragmentation of Social Networks
The last point is important because the Facebook folks seem to think that you'll only ever need one social network and everything that an application developer could ever need to do, can be done within Facebook; a sort of technology manifest destiny. However, fragmentation historically seen in other "applications" seems to refute this (unless you think, for whatever reason, the "social networking application" is unique). You see the creation of niche's along (at least) 2 vectors: features and demographics.
* Features: Webmail providers offer features and look-n-feel attractive to their specific segment. Think about the differences between Gmail (message threads) and Hotmail (traditional folders).
* Demographics: Take dating sites as an example. Sure, you can slice people's profile data any way you like, but niche's such as Jdate.com and Gay.com formed around incumbent Match.com.

What's my point?

My hypothesis is:
* Facebook *is* a great opportunity for developers to raise awareness of their brands and maybe monetize a little. A walled-garden like Facebook is attractive when technology and markets are immature because it provides a stable "pseudo-standard" for developers and business to work with.
* Over time, though, with openness, you'll see a fragmentation in social networks to address niches that address either feature-specific (eg language-learning specific features :) or demographic-specific user needs.