How about 400,000 registered customers on your second day of business. Holy crap! What would you do? Since Facebook's largest customer base is from my home region of Toronto, it makes for an interesting way to get local eyeballs.
Facebook’s timing is perfect. They just released an API that gives third party developers deep access to Facebook functionality and it’s 20 million users. Not only can these third party startups get a widget placed on people’s Facebook profiles, but they can also get viral distribution through users’ news feeds and access core Facebook features. Using the tools that Facebook made available, developers could build new versions of some of Facebook’s own applications, like Facebook Photos. Users can then remove those default applications and add the new ones. Like Microsoft with Windows, Facebook is now competing with application developers on its own platform.
This isn’t all just talk, either. The most popular third party application, iLike, has nearly 400,000 users
just a couple of days after launching and 10x what they had just last Friday. That means nearly 5% of Facebook’s users have now included it on their profile.
Source: MySpace v. Facebook: “It’s Not A Decision. It’s an IQ Test”
Another viral application is Silverlight. Microsoft recently launched 4GB worth of free disk space for Silverlight apps that are zipped up. I just setup my Silverlight Blog and started trying out Microsoft Expression and Microsoft Blend again, after a bit of a break. I'm no graphic designer, but since you can use .net in the background I'm going to have to brush up on my Photoshop skills again.
Let's see if I can make both of these pieces play together.
