What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [16]
These new products and businesses were made possible because Google provided a platform. Businesses’ use of the platform helped Google set the standard in mapping and local information. That gives Google huge traffic to its maps—tens of millions of users a month. Google invests to make maps better and better, licensing satellite pictures and hiring airplanes and cars to capture images of the ground. At the Burda DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference in Munich in 2008, Google’s Mayer, the vice president of search products and user experience, said, “We think of our geo technologies as building a mirror onto the world.” She said Google Maps has coverage for half the world’s population and a third of its land-mass. The public’s use of the maps adds yet more data, millions of bits of it. Users in Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, built the only comprehensive maps of their public-transit systems atop Google Maps. Users have also uploaded millions of geotagged photos associated with points on the maps, allowing us to get new views of places.
If you have a platform, you need developers and entrepreneurs to build on it, creating more functionality and value and bringing more users. Facebook did that. The social service got a big boost in attention and users when it enabled outsiders to create new applications inside the service. Within months, Facebook—which reached 500 employees in 2008—had 200,000 developers who created 20,000 new applications for users with virtually no staff cost to the company. When the service opened its Spanish and German versions, it didn’t translate itself but created a platform for translation and handed the task over to users, who did the work for free.
Facebook profited because it expanded and users had more reasons to spend more time on the service. To do this, Facebook had to open up its infrastructure and some of its secrets to let outsiders program on its platform. By contrast, the European Union fined Microsoft $1.4 billion in 2008 because it failed to charge developers reasonable prices for access to its platform so they could build products on top of it.
Facebook went a step farther and killed some of the applications its internal programmers had written, believing the community would do a better job making them. My son and webmaster, Jake, who was 15 at the time, programmed his version of one of the apps Facebook killed, Courses, in which students share their class schedules. Pardon a moment’s parental bragging, but his app rose to be No. 1 among its competitors—gathering information about 1.5 million classes—and he sold it to a competitor for enough to pay for a year of college.
Facebook did not charge Jake or other developers a penny for access to its code or its users, nor did Facebook take a cut of the advertising revenue developers earned. It was in Facebook’s interest to help developers succeed because they helped the company grow in value. Grow it did, to the point that Microsoft made an investment in 2008 that valued Facebook at $15 billion (versus competitor MySpace’s $580 million purchase by News Corp. in 2005).
I am a partner in a start-up called Daylife that created a platform to gather, analyze, organize, and distribute the world’s news. Just as it was beginning, I took the founder, Upendra Shardanand, to meet venture capitalist Fred Wilson. At the end of our meeting, Wilson asked: “Can I use your platform to build my own business? And before you answer, let