F8 - it’s big
FB’s ambition has been to be the “social operating system” of the internet. Ebay was an original platform for business, and FB ads the social dimension, and has already passed ebay’s pageviews. A key link on FB’s marketplace shows the listings of your Friends. It’s clear we’d prefer to do commerce with people we know, and this is a natural evolution of the internet - in <10 years I predict most web activity will be social. It's just more natural. Ebay is market capitalized at $44B, half off of its 2005 high, so is this commercial foray works out, FB will be easily over $5B. As Peter Thiel noted in the New York Times yesterday, Facebook is not for sale. (anymore)
Formalizing the position of businesses using the Platform (previously call Facebook API) will encourage designers to invest the development time. For example, I’ll implement it on PTrades.com my niche commodities trader social web application - so that for my on-Facebook members, their executed trades will appear in their mutual news feeds.
I also think F8 is a cool name, and it shouldn’t have been just for the big party. F8 is geeky, it looks like FB and it is a rather unique search keyword in the social webapp context. What’s I’M, Microsoft’s new IM initiative? Try to search google for that - only their sheer brilliance brings one right link into the top ten if you add “Microsoft” to the query. Now search for “f8 platform”, which shows clear results.
