Facebook, identity and throwing sheep

Way back in the dark mists of time, when Facebook first launched its platform on the desktop, one of the first hit apps was something called 'Superpoke'. Superpoke did quite a few things but the one that got all the attention was throwing sheep at people. That is, they'd open their Facebook news feed and it would say 'Benedict threw a sheep at you'. 

Of course, a website that did that would never work - you'd never get a critical mass of people to open an account on a new site just for that. But Superpoke could plug into the Facebook platform so you could do this fun little social thing right away with almost no friction. 

A lot of the social apps bubbling up now remind me of this. As I've written several times, by plugging into the smartphone address book, camera, photo library, notifications etc the frictional barriers to doing a new social app fade away: the smartphone is a social platform in the same way that Facebook is. The obvious expression of this is WhatsApp and similar things that directly address the core Facebook use cases. But it seems to me that there's at least as much potential in doing things that use the platform without trying to take over a core use case - things like throwing sheep. That is, the smartphone social platform enables a lot of experimentation with new ideas and behaviors that don't need to be your core comms channel and that would never have worked on the web, and (for a bunch of reasons) might not have been possible on the desktop Facebook platform.

Snapchat is arguably one of the biggest of these, and Secret is another. Firechat is also an interesting example - it leverages the wireless autodiscovery features in iOS7 to do hyperlocal chat. Of course this isn't quite as easy as Superpoke - you still need to install an app from the app store (for now, though that may well change) but the friction is still pretty low. With apps like Line, WeChat and Kik you can see people trying to pull this experimentation back up the stack and put it inside a social app again - that might be the right model for some things, but of course you're trading friction for flexibility. Making your own smartphone app needs that initial install but has much more power. 

I also think that (as I suggested here) retailers should be thinking about how they can leverage the social platform aspects of smartphones - shouldn't the Zappos app show you which of your friends have it and let you share shoes directly? Again, doing that well on the desktop would be really hard, but on a smartphone it's just a tap or two away. 

This takes us around to Facebook again. Perhaps the problem is not that people use WhatsApp instead of Facebook Messenger - rather it might be that they use Sephora instead of Facebook Messenger. This is partly about unbundling WhatsApp, just as WhatsApp unbundled Facebook, but it's also that the fads and gimmicks and silly little things (otherwise known as 'fun') don't happen within Facebook. The time sinks don't have to happen within Facebook. And maybe the commerce apps don't need to connect to it. 

The question implicit in all of this, of course, is identity. It's the machine-readable identify that allows all of this low-friction social experimentation. But what is the irreducible common denominator for connecting to your friends? Is it your Facebook identity? How much does it matter to Facebook if it isn't, if it still happens in something Facebook owns? Is it your PSTN phone number (which Facebook will actually let you use to find friends with the smartphone app)? Or do you change that from time to time without caring? The broader phone address book? Your email address? BBM Pin (cough)? Location? Would Apple try something within iOS (with the fingerprint scanner)? Where in the stack does the identify sit - the network, OS platform or something further up? Actually, I suspect there isn't any single common point that any company can own.