Note: This post was written prior to Facebook’s formal announcement detailing which data sets will be accessible by third party developers.

The web is flooded with news everyday, most of it trivial, but every once in a while we get a day that is a true game changer. Today is that day for all marketers. Today Facebook will announce changes to its API allowing third-party developers to access user submitted information from Facebook for use in their applications. You are asking yourself right now, what do geeky API calls have to do with marketing? Everything.

Now that you have read my previous post about API marketing, I hope that you are beggining to see the implications of Facebook’s announcement. Facebook with more than 200 million users is the largest social network on the Internet. API data has gone primarily under the radar until now because most applications offering APIs had much smaller user-bases. Twitter is the application that made API’s popular.  It has more than 3,000 applications built on its API but it only has around 13 million users. Facebook in addition to having a huge amount of users also has a vast variety of data from text, images, videos, etc.

Opening The Walled Garden

Until this most recent announcement of API changes Facebook as been considered a walled garden in which you had to be a member logged into Facebook to share information and once logged out the information was not accessible. Companies have had access to most user submitted information.  This includes information on sites like Twitter, Digg, message boards, and niche social networks thanks to tools like Google Blog Search, Filter Box, Radian6 and other tools built to monitor user submitted data. However, Facebook and its mountain of data remained the kid by itself standing in the corner.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Understand that these changes to its API offers Facebook the greatest potential for monetizing of their platform. Their has long been discussion about the lack of effectiveness of advertising in social networks and Facebook knows this. Lets be clear, really brilliant people work at Facebook, they know what they are doing. They understand the true value they have is in the data not eyeballs. I have said this before but it is worth repeating.

The social web economy is about data and relationships relationships not about eyeballs and impressions.

That being said this API announcement is the first step for Facebook to monetize its data. For example, Twitter users that use desktop applications are currently allowed 100 API requests per hour. Sending a tweet, looking up a profile, doing a search, are each one API request. Facebook could potentially set a free level of API request activity and then charge developers for additional API requests. This is a simplified monetization strategy but could be the foundation for the approach they take.

Implications For Brand Marketers:

If you are a marketer, your job changed today.  Today Facebook gave you the keys to a luxury sedan of consumer insight and data. Most commentary surrounding Facebook’s API changes will be detailing what developers can do with the new API. Their will also be discussions about the validity of building a business on another company’s platform. This post though is for marketers, especially the non-geek marketers, the people that may not even know what an API is.

Marketers have spent years trying to determine what their customers want and what triggers actually lead a consumer to by a product. This has been done through market research, focus groups, surveys and a host of other methods used to collect customer data. Today the social web has flipped that process because now consumers are freely submitting their own information onto the web and the organizations that can effectively collect and analyze it and use it to build positive relationships with consumers will be successful.

Facebook has opened the spigot on the web’s most robust source of social consumer data. Here are some examples of how this data could be used by brand marketers:

• Incorporate Facebook data into existing social media monitoring systems for added insight
• Company’s like Ford that have dealers that sell their products could build applications that sort by location consumers talking about buying or needing a new car and what they are looking for. This information could be used to provide insight to the dealer on local customers as well as their opinions of dealer’s advertising and marketing.
• Create an extensional of current CRM sales tools that incorporates individuals Facebook updates and data into their CRM profile in real-time. This could be used to make more relevant sales calls, meetings and help build relationships.
• Aggregate and display how consumers are currently using your product to showcase uses to potential consumers from a trusted third-party.

Above are only some quick thoughts and more possibilities will be known once Facebook releases its updated API documentation later today. If you are a marketer you must realize that user generated data is key to future consumer insights and building brand advocates. Today Facebook has handed you something you have long been looking for…

Today the interwebs are buzzing with the latest announcments from Facebook.  With today’s announcements Facebook is taking direct aim at Twitter. It has been reported, that last year Facebook tried to by Twitter for $500 million and Twitter declined. Twitter is really hot right now and many celebrities and businesses are using Twitter to reach their fans. With these two groups goes a lot of money and potential for being profitable. That is why today Facebook rolled out changes to its service to make it more real-time, like twitter and removing friend caps and private pages to make it more celebrity friendly.

With these changes by Facebook I have seen TONS of people commenting and tweeting that this is the end of Twitter and these changes will hurt Twitter badly. No they won’t.

Here are 6 reasons why:

1. Facebook and Twitter are completely different types of networks. Facebook is a network where you know the people personally and care about connecting with them. Twitter is a network in which you don’t know the people but instead care what they have to say and get to know them through the information they share.
2. Twitter is simple, Facebook is not so simple. It is not that Facebook is hard to use, because it is not, but compared to Twitter’s 140 characters; Facebook’s status updates, picture and video uploads, profile pages and the rest are much more complicated. Complicated isn’t bad, but it again means regardless of its changes Facebook can never be Twitter.
3. Information is accessed and delivered differently.  Facebook is a web portable with mobile web applications that keep all of its many features intact, that is if you have a phone with a web browser. Facebook can alert you via e-mail when certain actions happen, but otherwise you need to be sign in to the desktop or mobile version to use the service.  Twitter instead can be accessed through web, desktop apps, SMS and third-party applications.   More importantly Twitter can deliver updates, replies and direct messages through SMS making it open to anyone with a cell phone and making it a much more mobile network.
4. Twitter is Public, Facebook is Private. Facebook has always been a walled garden meaning that you had to be signed in to Facebook to see any part of Facebook. With Twitter profiles and messages are public unless your request that they be public. This means that in terms of data, search engine indexing and other open applications Twitter has a major advantage.
5. Twitter has Twitter Search. Looking back on Twitter’s first few years as a company, one of the smartest things they did was to purchase Summize and make it Twitter Search allowing for real-time searching of information on Twitter. This has lead to endless possibilities for monitoring trends, events, and everything else. This information is very valuable and will be at the core of how Twitter will make money. Facebook can’t and does not have this.
6. Twitter’s API beats Facebook’s applications. This final point gets back to the idea of the walled garden idea of Facebook. Twitter has a rich API that has lead to the development of thousands of applications that use Twitter. Many people use Twitter without ever going to the web interface. Instead to access Facebook applications you must be signed into Facebook. This type of closed approach to development limits the way people can use the applications and how the application developers can make money.

Facebook is a giant force in the social networking space and with 175 million users and counting will not have any problems with long-term growth and success. My point is that regardless of the changes Facebook makes, it won’t be Twitter. Twitter will have its own opportunities for growth and the two services should have no problem coexisting.

These changes aren’t the death of Twitter, rather they validate the power of Twitter.