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Great article on different types of “Platforms”

Read this and get smarter: blog.pmarca.com: The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet.

The fastest summary:

  • A Level 1 platform’s apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services — this is how Flickr does it.

  • A Level 2 platform’s apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API — this is how Facebook does it.  Most likely, a Level 2 platform’s apps also call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.

  • A Level 3 platform’s apps run inside the platform itself — the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app’s code runs.

And which companies are working on Level 3 platforms, other than Marc’s Ning?

  • Salesforce.com

  • SecondLife

  • Amazon (through AWS)

  • Akamai

I think the really interesting part of a Level 2 and Level 3 really has to do with user acquisition – they allow you to absorb a huge torrent of traffic if your application is designed to hook into their API deeply enough to create viral loops of your own.

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Written by Andrew Chen
September 16th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
  • http://www.blogrush.com/r14898058 BlogRush

    How would you classify this new blog traffic widget, which appears to be “going viral”? I guess level 2 since it’s running elsewhere but gives some minor passive functionality to the blog visitor (signup link, different blog post titles each time).

  • http://pullur.wordpress.com/ Vijay

    Andrew,

    What are your thoughts on a social networking web platform that can be deployed alongside a portal or ecommerce site? I found Marc’s classification inetersting, have made a small extension to that on my blog posting.

    Vijay
    Dekoh

  • http://tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk/blog/ Adam Martin

    This doesn’t make sense to me.

    How is a level 3 “better for the developer” than a level 2?

    You have to do more work, you pay more in ongoing costs, and any of your developer-users who are competent (i.e. likely to produce something successful) don’t get any appreciable benefit.

    Hosting is incredibly cheap these days, and developing basic functionality is incredibly easy – look at the proliferation of non-programmers and what they’ve done on FB. Reducing the dev cost and hosting cost over and above a level 2 platform seems to have very little actual point to it.

    And, worst of all, with a level 3 platform, you make it into an “all-or-nothing” proposal, completely about-face from what has driven the proliferation of Web 2.0: people hate using you because you’ve become a proprietary platform that they cannot exist without.

    If I develop an FB app, and FB disappears tomorrow, I can still run my app all over the web with almost literally no changes to code.

    If I develop something in SL, and Linden implodes tomorrow … I lose everything.

  • http://tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk/blog/ Adam Martin

    Actually, I think this is so intensely wrong, I wrote it up in more detail:

    http://tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/09/27/internet-as-platform-marc-andreessen-is-wrong/

    /me ducks and runs for cover

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