The opportunities for ambitious, smart, and innovative start-ups and small businesses only keep growing, as even more platforms for smaller applications and products open up. Generally we focus on what we call iEntrepreneurship--the way in which the increasingly ubiquitous iPhone enables third parties to create cool new applications that are based on the iPhone platform and then, in some cases, make a ton of money off of them (all while giving Apple yet one more selling point for its own product). But there are other smartphones besides the iPhone, which are also potential platforms; and there are other potential platforms besides smartphones.

The latest new platform appears to be the mammoth (over 200 million active users!) social-networking site Facebook. According to TechCrunch, though Facebook has historically been among those platforms most reluctant to give third parties free rein, it is changing its tune: it is going to grant developers and potential developers access to much more data, including photos and videos posted by users (with the users' permissions, natch). It also plans more generally to make data transporting more open. Add it all up, and the opportunities for Facebook app-developers, and for developers utilizing Facebook's data, is likely to expand greatly.

"It’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third-party sites and services to built on top of it," TechCrunch writes. It's fascinating stuff. And given who many of those "third-party sites and services" are or are offered by, this "hot trend" is definitely good for small business.


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