Syndicating Experiences
Posted on 28. Apr, 2009 by Jason Chan in Customer Experience
There’s nothing new about syndication. It’s been around for decades, notably in newsmedia and TV. Then the web came around and RSS made it really easy to syndicate just about any piece of content you could think of. But what about syndicating experiences? Is that something that can be done?
Yesterday, Facebook announced that it would open up its status stream to developers. This has a number of implications for how we experience brands. It means we can experience Facebook in ways that Facebook didn’t originally intend but more importantly, it cedes control of the consumption of content from facebook.com to myriad other sites. It’s sort of like RSS for Facebook updates.
While many will say this is a move to better compete with Twitter and it’s very extensible API, this is a win for developers who want to take advantage of the rich data available through Facebook. While this approach has already been somewhat legitimized by RSS years ago with everything now becoming available in feed-form, with Facebook we’re now talking about protected content. How much of this protected content that gets included in the stream isn’t clear.
For a while, I’ve been advocating that e-business is about engaging with customers wherever they live. Facebook knows that it doesn’t want to be a destination, it wants to be a service — a service that can live everywhere, and one that follows customers wherever they wish to spend time. This is an example of “social functionality” as described in Jeremiah Owyang’s “The Future of the Social Web.”
Facebook may end up losing ad revenue because their content is being consumed outside of the site, and presumably with or without ads. But to me, the benefits could outweigh any drawbacks. Benefits include:
- Scale: Opening up the stream gives Facebook content an infinite number of venues to come to life in without having to build the infrastructure; you rely on others to build it.
- Ubiquity: You’ll now be able to get Facebook streams anywhere there’s an internet connection and a screen.
- Extensibility: Developers can slice/dice the content in ways that were not previously available.
(We’re also going to have a whole set of new metrics too, but let’s save that for another post.)
I’ll be keeping my eye out on how creative developers get with the Facebook stream. Something tells me we may be learning more about our friends in ways we hadn’t previously imagined.
