The BUTT'N, Part II

So I posed the question yesterday, albeit in slightly different form:

Can you build a successful social network on the back of another grossly successful social network?

Here’s the postulation: Could we, as Uncharted – or any other fledgling social network – build and maintain a business on Facebook and, in fact, thrive and make money, while letting Facebook keep its finger in the pie by handling the data, the comments, the advertising (getting to keep the money, of course) the server space and such? We’re already looking at everything but advertising as revenue streams, so letting Facebook keep the ad cash isn’t that big of a deal.

Here’s why I’m postulating: Maybe it’s old new media to say, hey, I’ve built a website, a social network, here I am, come here! Maybe the new new media is just going to set up shop, squatter-like, on Facebook, where the people already are.

We kinda saw that with MySpace before Facebook came along: It was, and still is, a hot spot for musicians and musical artists who found a place to set up shop where their friends and fans were already.

That’s how the big newspapers used to do it long ago, with their newsboys shouting Extra, Extra, read all about it. And such. They went to where the people were – the street, the train stations, the markets and et cetera.

Facebook doesn’t seem to mind if people set up a business Facebook site, and one could easily see a business using Facebook as its primary spot for visitors and customers, if only for customer service and such. There are plenty of people out there willing to show you how to use Facebook for your business. Facebook itself is already hip to taking business advertising, can business hosting be too far behind? As long as Facebook doesn’t pull an Apple and want 30 percent of the revenue earned from said businesses, such an arrangement probably works.

We may be entering the age where not only are brick and mortar stores not necessary, but neither are individual web sites, painstakingly and expensively built, when there’s already a platform out there where you can shout Extra! Extra! And get people’s attention while doing it. Because, for the most part, they're already there.