Another “Marc Canter was right” Moment…

…brought to you by several social networks.

Yes, in reading this post from the ProgrammableWeb blog, I smiled to myself and thought in my head, “damn, that guy Marc Canter was right again”. During my time at Tribe.net, while Marc was consulting for us, if there was one mantra he would not get off of, it was “you need to open up the APIs, and things will be coolio”. He preached that developers wanted to do stuff and you needed to give them access for good things would happen. As the biz dev guy my first question was always, “but what’s the business model?”, to which there wasn’t a real good answer at the time. Well, ha-ha, the answer was there, just not so obvious to us at the time. Developers will build stuff that users will like and that will result in more users signing up, and that helps any business model. Don’t believe it? Here’s an excerpted quote from Jeff Roberto at Friendster on the ProgrammableWeb’s post:

After social network Friendster opened up its proprietary software to a select dozen or so developers six months ago, the number of unique visitors rose by 17.6%, to 18.8 million, in December, 2006. “This is our biggest [month-over-month] growth since launch,” says Jeff Roberto, marketing director at Friendster. Now, for example, Friendster users can create slide shows of photos on Slide.com and then post them directly onto the social-networking site.

Well, if that don’t beat all. Imagine if they had opened up to more, sooner. Given that this is not the first call that I’ve witnessed Marc make to come true, can’t say it surprises me, but that the results from this occurrence (note how many social networks in the referenced post are now committed to this direction) manifested themselves so precisely the way he said they would and in under three years, is certainly blog post worthy. Some times he comes across a bit opinionated mind you, but it’s now been my direct first hand experience that he has made some good calls, and I can’t say I can yet count any significantly memorable bad calls. I’m humbled by the future he saw that was harder for me to see at that time. Of course, Marc’s PeopleAggregator platform is already set-up in an open manner, but it’s good to see that his mantra came to be after all.

Tags: marc canter, social networks, friendster, peopleaggregator, tribe