Let’s go! – by Stefanos Vasdekis A blog about entrepreneurship, the web2.0 world, and life.

3Feb/08Off

Building social apps on top of social apps

It's the next logical step. Super Wall has replaced Facebook's classic wall. The same has happened with poking and sending gifts. Facebook's classic messaging application lacks common features that come standard in other email applications, like search, forwarding and attachements. Similarly the classic groups application and the status updates are inferior to other independent services. Maybe Super Groups and Super Messages applications could replace the classic ones. And later Super Super Groups with more features could replace Super Groups. But I don't think this is the best path.

What if a developer could build a feature on top of any application. One developer could build the forwarding functionality in messaging and another developer the attachements functionality, not necessarily hosted on facebook's servers. And maybe another developer take the existing groups functionality to build a groups version targeted to a certain industry.

The opportunities are endless. It's not just Facebook's classic applications that one could extend. There are also 15.000 more applications and soon with Opensocial even more will be built.

I also think that OpenSocial, Data Prortability project, Google's Social Graph API, Facebook's Platform Licensing, Facebook's Open Source JavaScript Library and other projects that will be announced in the next months will make developers and companies invest more time and money on social apps, as they will have more control and a broader audience. And the next generation of applications will definitely be more feature-rich and less isolated. It's an interesting game not only to watch, but also to participate!