Is SuperGroups the Next Killer App for Facebook?
In several of recent AllThingsD.com posts, Kara Swisher has bemoaned the current “childish” state of facebook apps:
1. The Children’s Hour - Facebook Apps Are For Toddlers - There We Said It
2. The Children’s Hour - Part 2 - Can Facebook Apps Grow Up
3. Scoble Is So Right About Kara Being SSSSooooo Right About Silly Facebook Apps
In essence, she is complaining about the lack of a “killer app” for facebook, which has historically been defined as: as the single app that would convince people to buy the machine that the app ran on.
The First Killer App
At the dawn of the PC era, there was a product called the Apple II that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak thought was cool and which they built to impress their friends with Woz’s engineering genius. The first versions had cool color graphics which could be seen when hooked up to a TV monitor and included stripped-down BASIC. The first machines even lacked a SHIFT key so only UPPER CASE characters could be input and displayed. At the time (like Kara’s recent posts about facebook) some said, “How childish… a machine from and for alpha geeks in the homebrew computer club to make games on and not good for much else.”
Well, I worked in a computer store in San Antonio in 1980 when a little piece of software called VisiCalc came out. I was instantly selling a lot of Apple II’s to businessmen who were dealing with huge ledgers of white-out strewn inventory counts and balance sheets. These serious folks wearing suits whipped out their wallets to buy the Apple II the second they saw how I used VisiCalc to create a spreadsheet with their actual data in it and how VisiCalc auto-magically recalculated hundreds of sub-totals and totals in their work when I simulated correcting a mistyped entry.
From this experience, I formulated:
Lorenzen’s First Law of Selling Software:
If you use demonstrate the usefulness of a product using the customer’s own data then that customer will buy whatever software, hardware and/or service is necessary to replicate the solution they have just witnessed.
In addition to helping me understand the future of the software industry and to earn some money to help me finish college, VisiCalc was the killer app that put Apple and Steve Jobs on the road to billions of dollars in software-created wealth.
In my career, the short list of killer apps that drove hardware and/or platform purchases is as follows:
1. VisiCalc — Apple II
2. Lotus 123 & WordPerfect — IBM PC
3. Excel & WORD — Windows
4. PageMaker — Mac and Laserwriter
5. iTunes — iPod
The real point is that Facebook is exactly ONE APPLICATION away from having their Social Operating System embraced and endorsed by the entire business world. This killer app for facebook will quickly zoom to the top of the app list (above many of the “childish apps” that Kara complains about) and will be the first app that causes new business users to join facebook — just like VisiCalc caused business people to buy the only computer that could run VisiCalc.
Is SuperGroups the Killer App for Facebook?
As I mentioned in an early comment to Kara’s Part-2 post above, Facebook’s own Groups app could be a possible starting point for a Killer App for business people. The current Facebook Groups app’s “Create Event” feature works well and gracefully leverages the social graph to broadcast events and track attendees’ RSVP’s. This app, which Mark Zuckerberg wrote himself in one evening, leads to more than twice as many invitations being sent and responded to than evite.com. This is part of why Facebook has over 6 million groups because they are created by college students (and others) whenever they are planning a party and want a centralized place to distribute news about the location, time and likely attendees at a party.
The Groups app also allows the group creator to send messages to their entire group and I have found this to be quite useful in a business setting. In fact, when launching the Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund, I created the “Official Altura Ventures & AppFactory Facebook Investment Fund” group to publicize our news and to attract developers, prospective limited partners and the press to the news and discussion posts that I write there. This has worked well and has helped create a place from which I can address our key constituencies and I’ve even used the Group’s “Make Officer” feature to highlight and honor the facebook developers who are members of the group and have written successful apps.
With respect to sending a message to the entire group, the group owner(s) can do this at the beginning of the group’s formation but Facebook cuts off this capability when your group exceeds 1,000 members. I think this is kind of a silly restriction and it hampers a real business but I guess facebook is trying to prevent folks from using groups to spam folks. My own belief is that this limitation should be removed because groups are opt-in and any user can remove themselves from a group with a single click if they receive even a single unwanted message from the group. However, the 1,000 member limit does show Mark Zuckerberg’s fanatical dislike of spam and prevents the Groups app from being misused to create spam-traps for unwitting users.
SuperGroups = Groups + Apps
If App Developers could target the group page with the missing group features (like they can currently target Personal Profile pages) and if Group owners/creators could monetize their group members by either displaying ads or charging to join subscription-based groups via a single facebook payment system, then we have the makings of the first Killer App on facebook that every cataloger, e-tailer, retailer, brand manager, blogger, unique content owner, etc. would want to use to connect with their key influencer customers.
This Super Groups app is my current suggestion for a Killer App candidate for Facebook. If there are developers out there working on it, please contact me and perhaps we’ll invest in your company.
In the case of facebook, the definition of a Killer App will be one that causes people who aren’t yet on Facebook to Join Facebook itself. In that sense, you might say that the Friend Lists, Photos and Events apps are already Killer Apps for high school and college students. The next Killer App will be one that crosses over and brings in business people. Ideally, this will be combined with a Facebook universal shopping cart and wallet service that will allow these SuperGroup creators to efficiently monetize the audiences they build on top of the social graph (with facebook taking a share of all of this revenue). Then folks will see why I believe Facebook is worth $100 billion .
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the first facebook-only VC
(c) 2007 Altura Ventures LLC.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Even if someone creates a killer supergroup app the idea will probably be copied by facebook itself and added into every group on the site. Then the “killer” app won’t be so killer anymore. People have to think WAY out of the box to create something that will be successful and facebook won’t copy.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
This is off-topic, but considering the risk of Facebook copying your Facebook-app, then apps for Google’s forthcoming “social layer” could be looking at a much more appealing “eco system”.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
It’s the same risk people face when developing for Windows, and Microsoft has a much worse track record in this regard. There are plenty of signs that at this point Facebook isn’t looking to take over the top apps.
For example, they removed their internal “courses” functionality and let app developers step in to create the replacement. Several have cropped up targeted at different segments: high school, college, etc.
Even if Facebook were to turn “evil” in the way MSFT is seen, there’s a reason Windows is still the platform of choice for people writing desktop software. It’s where the users are.
By developing for Facebook you reduce the cost of acquisition for a user to almost nothing — just a single click is all it takes for them to be using your app and for you, the app developer, to be monetizing them. On top of that you have the newsfeed which is hands down the best software distribution mechanism ever created.
If Google can replicate these two features then sure, maybe they have a chance.
December 14th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Wait, so will Facebook sell computers with Facebook pre-installed, too? you have to admit that Windows is a bit stickier than Facebook. Facebook doesn’t yet have much ability to use anti-competitive measures to maintain its dominan… er.. 2nd place in the US status.
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:06 am
[…] Is SuperGroups the Next Killer App for Facebook? […]
June 19th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
The Super-Group category that has not been developed to full potential in any way is the Search or Information services category.
This will drive Google crazy, however, as the Google/Yahoo Super-Corporate -business driven advertising world continues to forsake the largest percentage of business in the U.S.-The small-business owner, One can only believe that this should catch on as a Super-Group. Those who cannot compete financially in Google-World will turn to Social Networking to get their message across.
There is already a simple way to do it, without giving away your wife’s ring-size, or selling anything. These people need a level playing field. Facebook can easily be the even surface needed to make small business stick out in the crowd.