Developers Unsure Of Facebook's Enterprise Push

A handful of enterprise users are trailblazing the applications path, trusting that a user base will emerge of Facebook denizines more interested in business tools than HoboWars. Clara Shih, an AppExchange product manager at Salesforce.com, drew notice among bloggers and CRM users with "Faceforce," a recently released application she developed that pulls Facebook data into Salesforce.com, offering users additional details on their customers, prospects and business partners.

While Shih has been an active Facebook user almost since the site's inception, Faceforce's catalyst was the f8 developer conference Facebook staged in May.

"After the f8 keynote, I realized that the lines are completely blurring between the consumer and enterprise worlds," Shih said. "For many in my generation, work is play. ... Five years from now, no enterprise app -- CRM, HR, ERP -- won't be integrated with the social graph."

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For programmers and ISVs looking to leverage Facebook as a development platform, the most lucrative way to do it right now is by playing to the crowd: developing toys or tools that improve users' experiences with Facebook and their other social networking resources. Facebook's most-active application developer is Slide, a company whose entire business model is based on widgets -- "blog bling," as they're colloquially dubbed.

Slide's major hit is "Top Friends," a Facebook tool for quick links to friends' profiles that has 3 million active daily users. It also makes plug-ins for managing photos and videos, skins to customize UIs, and dozens of other catchy add-ons. While Slide's applications are frivolous, its management firepower isn't: the company's founder and CEO is PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and its backers include a number of Silicon Valley's leading lights in venture capital. Those investors aren't shy about talking up the company's potential. If Slide eventually cashes out for the same figure Levchin's PayPal took in its acquisition by eBay, $1.5 billion, Levchin "would regard it as abject failure," Slide investor David Weiden, a general partner at Khosla Ventures, recently told Business Week.

But like everyone else in the social media space -- and in an eerie echo of the Web 1.0 boom's Achilles heel -- Slide hasn't proven it can translate ubiquitous usage to cash and profits. Slide's widgets are all free to users; right now, the company relies on advertising to make money. As a private company, it doesn't have to report its financials, but it will take a lot of ad sales to meet Levchin's lofty goals. (Slide representatives turned down requests for an interview, saying the company's executives are too busy building the business to respond to media requests.)

Other Facebook ISVs, even those with a more enterprise focus, are also following the "get big first, worry about money later" model. One recently launched application, AppSmash, is the product of a brainstorming session between entrepreneur Tom Blue and his developer partners about ways to make Facebook more useful for business networking. The result: a searchable business directory in which people can list their skills, with a corresponding widget they can add to their profiles to tout their expertise and professional interests.

Though Blue and a colleague are now working nearly fulltime on AppSmash development, he isn't yet sure what the business model for AppSmash will be. "For now, the thinking is 'we're going to fund it and grow it and get it as big as we possibly can,'" Blue said. "At that point we would like to put in some type of advertising."

That strategy may pay off if Facebook continues its hypergrowth and evolves into a legitimate enterprise networking and collaboration tool. That destiny, however, is far from certain.

"I think it'll be like a lot of other cultural networking tools that are available -- it will be one of the tools in your chest," said IT Matters' Crawford. "But there may be something bigger on the horizon that will push Facebook into the 'where are they now' territory, like Plaxo and some of the other networking services of the past."