It is quite easy to post to several microbloggins services at once. Jaiku does a great job of importing RSS feeds, so posts to Twitter or Pownce can easily be imported to Jaiku. Via Twitterfeed it is easy to get an RSS feed into your Twitter as well. I haven’t found any easy way of getting an RSS feed into Pownce. Also there are apps like Twhirl that let’s you post to all 3 platforms at once. In my case I also use the Twitter Facebook app to get my tweets into my Facebook status and I am looking for a way to do the same with LinkedIn (no success yet). So posting cross-platform is not a problem, even if it means that you need to do some configuration and that all your posts gets trippled or quadrupled.

Reading friends posts from several platforms could also easily be done. I could of course go to all the different services and read each posts on each one, but since I want to do other things with my day than that I would rather use services like FriendFeed or SocialThing that aggregates it all into one place. FriendFeed imports from most sources and have some nice comment features, but the UI really desperatly needs a designers touch. SocialThing imports from just a few places so far (please please add RSS now!) but I still prefer it to FriendFeed. These services and others make it easy to see your friends posts from several platforms in one place. What is missing is a way to naturally post back to the microblogging platforms from these services.

What is needed, and what will come very soon I am sure, is a mashup of all these microbloggin platforms to allow users to be active on several platforms at once all from one place. I would like to see an app that allows me to interact with Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku completely. This means reading other peoples posts, replying to posts to have a conversation going cross-platform and posting to all platforms at once. Since all of the platforms have APIs this should be possible to implement (and for all I know it already exists somewhere, if you know of such an app please let me know through a comment on this post!). This would be a great mashup that would breach the community silos that exists today. Short of everyone moving to one platform a mashup is the best answer to this problem.

Btw, I have some extra SocialThing invites so if anybody wants one please let me know via a comment on this post.

The Web is full of Ecosystems

There are already plenty of Ecosystems out there. Amazon was one of the first companies that understood the power of this, and created an open API that developers all over the world now are using (and thereby increasing the sales of books for Amazon, plus the brand recognition of course). YouTube’s success is largly due to the ease of including and showing videos on your own sites and blogs (the real success was of course that Google pay a ridiculous amount of dollars for them, but that is a completely different story). Flickr is doing the same for photos online. WordPress is an OK blog engine, but it would be nothing without all the plugins, so that is another successful Ecosystem. In the Enterprise world there is of course Salesforce that now has more requests coming in via their API than via their web page.

There are also successful such Ecosystems that are not based on web applications. Firefox (OK, that one is almost web based, just humor me please) is a great browser, but without all the add-ons it is not that usefull (me love Firebug!). Apple has been very successful in creating an Ecosystem around the iPod, just think of how many companies make great money by just producing skins and other extensions to the iPod.

The Platform Wins

What is in it for the Platform is pretty evident: more loyal users that have more reason to keep coming back. This is hard to create, and if System Providers build apps on your Platform then basically you are expanding your development deparment and you have more brilliant minds trying to figure out the killer app for your users. Also this is a great way to keep the competition at bay. Now when Facebook is becoming a Platform and not just a site it will either force the main competition MySpace to do the same or be left behind.

The System Providers Win

The System Providers that write applications that run on the Platform (most likely called something fancy like widget, gadget, addon, plugin or extension) gets access to a whole lot of ready made functionality and a huge existing user base. There is no longer any need to implement photo album funcitonality for your web app, just use Flickr. No need to build video capabilities, just use YouTube. If you build an app for Salesforce you can sell it on their AppExchange and make some money. So in short you get both functionality and a userbase, that is a pretty good deal.

The Users Win

The users can stay on one platform and take full advantage of that the platform continously gets more and more functionality added. Since each of the System Providers do not have to implement the most basic functionality (user handling, file uploading, photo album etc) they can concentrate on new great features, which of course benefits the end users. So more cooler useful features, that makes uses happy.

Win Win Win and Lose

The winners are the Platform providers that are in the center of the Ecosystem, the System Providers that gets features and a user base for free and the users that get more features quicker. That is a pretty impressive Win-Win-Win scenario.

The losers are the companies that do not understand that Ecosystems are the new type of light weight business partnerships. Either you try to be a Platform or you take advantage of whatever the Platforms around you offers. To build a new big web application and not provide an API is simply failing to take use of a huge opportunity. To build any web site and not take advantage of one or more existing Ecosystems is to do more work than you need to. It seems like Facebook really has realized that (that is no good reason to say no to the $1 billion that Yahoo is rumoured to have offered, saying no to $1 billion is always a bad move in my humble opinion).