We have been doing lots of thinking and practical work on the Facebook platform lately. My good friend Adam Loving, the inventor of Zuckerbucks, Toy Chest, and more recently Lab Builder has been telling me for months that Facebook is the future. Now I think he is right!
Recently we’ve extended Facebook Answers (our Q&A platform built on HelpShare technology) so it can easily be added to Facebook Business Pages, like Eco-metro (publishers of Chinook Book). In this way, the brand, focused on “green community” can easily engage users around Q&A, building traffic and content. We are working with them to see how far we can push the overall Facebook platform as well as utilize the right blend of 3rd party apps like Answers.
This platform and the Business Page concept will allow many businesses to extent their brands into the Facebook community in a rich and simple way, blending users and apps to create an entirely new interaction model with their consumers. This in turn will bring more users to the platform as people make invites, become fans, ask/answer questions, post stories, share content… With more users, more businesses will be attracted and the cycle accelerates. In addition, that rich development platform means end-users, businesses and most importantly app developers like Adam will be incented to create even more engaging and valuable applications which can be added to an expanding number of personal or business pages, again drawing users into this space.
My wife, Teresa McCann is now on Facebook now and beginning to promote here photography business using these tools, which is amazing and very powerful.
Not sure where it all ends up, but there is certainly some serious potential. Fred Wilson at Union Square ventures has made a few posts about this potential and I am beginning to think the $15B valuation was right.
