Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, launched this concept and product in May 2007 (
see video). Some interesting facts that he provided were: 24 million active users, 100,000 new users being added each day, 60% of users were outside college, 50 million users by the end of the year and 40 billion page views per month. While these are astounding, his articulation of platform effects were even better. The new platform will allow third parties to launch applications that work well with facebook. On the day it was launched there were 65 companies and 80 applications. In a month,
WSJ reports that there are 800 new services available for 27 million users. Fueling this growth is what Mark Zuckerberg calls the social graph. Because users use facebook to feed and nourish their social network, the system is able to capture this network via the communication patterns. This social graph acts as a filter for any new communication and gets better as users accept or reject suggestions. Face book uses this graph to provide news feeds and suggest applications for users. Developers of applications benefit by reaching relevant users. As Zuckerman put it.. the next generation of Adobe and Intuit will be launched on this social operating system.