Move over killer apps, the platform era is here

Having a killer app alone is not enough to succeed - successful online businesses are those that evolve into web platforms which support wider ecosystems of developers, in the manner of a Google, Facebook or Second Life.

That's the view of company executives on a panel at Fortune magazine's first 'iMeme: Thinkers of Tech' conference.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of CRM specialist Salesforce.com, said: "The internet is the new operating system. The killer apps of the internet are becoming platforms that are creating communities of innovation. This is a whole new chapter in our industry."

He added: "The power of the platform is it makes your core offering more valuable." Platforms are able to extend into new markets by being open to outside developers, he said. For instance, application development that Thomson Financial and Dow Jones did on Salesforce.com suddenly made his company "a huge player in the financial services market", said Benioff.

He said: "We replaced Siebel [Systems]; they never made the leap from killer app to platform. If you don't make that leap, you don't become a major player like an SAP or an Oracle."

Sitting next to dot-com veteran Benioff, was 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who started the popular Facebook social networking site in his college dorm room less than four years ago. Facebook's move to open the site up to outside developers and to allow anyone, not just college students, to use the site has led to a surge in membership registrations.

Zuckerberg said: "The most natural way for people to communicate and the most efficient was through [friends and acquaintances online]. To us, opening up the platform was just the next step in developing this theory."

He added: "We're going to give you all the same tools that we give ourselves; treat your apps the same as ours."

That move quickly paid off. Thousands of applications have been released for Facebook since late May when the company opened up the platform. Zuckerberg said: "It has certainly grown a bit faster than we had originally expected. We thought there would be a lead time. That whole process got condensed to about a week."

Within one week the first new application had a million users, while more than half of the users have added an application to their Facebook page, Zuckerberg said.

He added: "We're going to be constantly pushing the envelope. There is still a lot of stuff we need to do with developers, a lot more controls we can give to people."

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, which not only offers advertising systems that enable anyone with a website to make money off that site but has also actively encouraged developers to make mash-ups of its apps, said the search giant may even go further than just releasing developer tools.

She said: "We just have so many ideas that we can't implement... so it makes sense to open it up. The coup de grace would be letting people build on our platform, on our servers."

That idea is complicated and thus "something we're interested in but we haven't made many advances on" it, she added.

Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com