Benedict Evans:
“by plugging into the address book, camera, photo library, notifications etc the frictional barriers to doing a new social app fade away: the smartphone is a social platform in the same way that Facebook is. The obvious expression of this is WhatsApp and similar things that directly address the core Facebook use cases. But it seems to me that there’s at least as much potential in doing things that use the platform without trying to take over a core use case – things like throwing sheep. That is, the smartphone social platform enables a lot of experimentation with new ideas and behaviors that don’t need to be your core comms channel and that would never have worked on the web, and (for a bunch of reasons) might not have been possible on the desktop Facebook platform.”
We’ve only said this 9,000 times, but market share numbers do not mean that Android users are buying apps. Until Android users buy more apps (and Android isn’t a cesspool of malware and piracy and fragmentation), developers will continue to ship for iOS first and maybe Android later if they’re bored and there’s nothing good on TV.
TechCrunch: “Android Is Winning” « John Moltz’s Very Nice Web Site
There are more parameters to the attractivity of a platform than just market share. This is neither new nor hard to understand.
http://newnetland.com/2012-08-weve-only-said-this-9-000-times-but-market-share/
Twitter-CEO: We want to move away from companies that “build off of Twitter, to a world where people build into Twitter.”
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in an interview on WSJ.com:
In its events push, Mr. Costolo said Twitter is vying to “more closely tie the shared experience on Twitter to the actual event that is happening.” As Twitter burnishes its platform, Mr. Costolo added that Twitter also wants to move away from companies that “build off of Twitter, to a world where people build into Twitter.”
There you have it. Because of the chosen ad based business model Twitter is moving from an offsite integration to onsite integration. If they go cracking down on clients from third parties and other apps they will almost certainly lose their prime position in the web ecosystem. Good for everyone else as Twitter had for a long time the almost sole attention of indie web developers looking for a web platform to build off on.
That is bad for Twitters long term outlook but the investors, who at this point almost certainly are the driving force behind the companys moves, are probably eyeing an IPO that comes right after the first big ad successes in numbers and before the probable meltdown of Twitters usage.
Interestingly Twitters biggest competitor Facebook is earning most of its revenues with advertisement but doesn’t seem to have a problem with offsite integration from Open Graph to clients.
Define web platform
What is a web platform? The term that is being used by lots of people to describe web services new and old is actually not understood by many. A portal like Yahoo is not a platform. eBay is a platform. Amazons core business as an online retailer doesn’t fall under the term ‘platform’. Amazons marketplace however is one.
Online marketplaces are platforms. Etsy, Amazon Marketplace, eBay.
You got an API? You got yourself a platform. From Facebook to Twitter, every web service with an API is a platform. And there are lots of them.
Now how you define platform?
A platform is infrastructure.
A platform is also a promise like Horace Dediu once said.
A platform is the basis for, and here we finally come to the definition, a two-sided market.
In a two-sided market two (or more) distinct groups of users come together. They both are subject to cross-side network effects meaning one group extracts more value out of the platform the more members of the other group are using it and vice versa.
In two-sided networks, users on each side typically require very different functionality from their common platform. In credit card networks, for example, consumers require a unique account, a plastic card, access to phone-based customer service, a monthly bill, etc. Merchants require terminals for authorizing transactions, procedures for submitting charges and receiving payment, “signage” (decals that show the card is accepted), etc. Given these different requirements, platform providers may specialize in serving users on just one side of a two-sided network. A key feature of two-sided markets is the novel pricing strategies and business models they employ. In order to attract one group of users, the network sponsor may subsidize the other group of users. Historically, for example, Adobe’s portable document format (PDF) did not succeed until Adobe priced the PDF reader at zero, substantially increasing sales of PDF writers. Relative to Apple computer’s initial pricing, Microsoft also steeply discounted systems developer toolkits (SDKs) leading to more rapid development of applications for MS Windows.
Cross-side network effects and differing price sensitivities between the distinct groups are the basis for every decision by platform providers.
If you want to understand the world of web platforms you have to understand the dynamics of two-sided markets.
The goal of this blog is to explore this emerging world which is dominated by these network economics and starts to touch every sector of the economy.
