Drew Meyers is right. Facebook is Completely Changing the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants to build the first social media OS and with the F8 release last week, he’s done just that.
To recap. Facebook’s F8 release means anyone can build an application on top of the social network and have it distributed throughout its entire user base. What this means is, Facebook is opening up its platform and instantly giving developers access to their over 20+ million users. And it’s even offering to give them 100% of the advertising and transaction revenue they generate.
Why is Facebook being so generous? Because they know the more things they can offer for people to do, the more time people will hang out on the site (and believe me, it can be addictive), which simply gives them more options to ultimately monetize that traffic.
This is pretty groundbreaking stuff, because it means as a developer you can instantly launch your product to a massive audience. No surprise then to date, more than 70 companies have taken them up on their offer.
Brian Brady argues that MySpace should just buy a number of the new Real Estate 2.0 players. I agree with his rationale – though I doubt it will happen and besides, Facebook has just scooped them.
So, how could some of the Real Estate 2.0 players take advantage of Facebook?
Zillow could allow you to share your home’s Zestimate to your network or your network’s network and allow people to modify the Zestimate based on their local knowledge (a simple yes/no if they think it’s accurate) – Zillow could easily build out the accuracy of their Zestimates in local markets.
Trulia could build out its Voices product so you could ask and answer questions to Trulia experts through the Facebook environment.
vFlyer could let you share your listing flyers to your whole network and have people pass them on to others as well.
Newcomers like Yourstreet and My-Currency are all crowd dependent. They should be angling immediately to integrate their products into Facebook’s user base.
I’m increasingly convinced that social networks are going to be an important arena for agents to focus their marketing (see Marketing Real Estate on Facebook) – but I also think, moving forward, that they’re going to be critically important to driving the success of some of these new Internet based companies as well.
