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Kaila Colbin

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In an online ecosystem, the barnacles offer the benefit

By Kaila Colbin on Fri, 04/03/09 - 12:35am.

You know you've made it online when other people start building services around you.

Okay, Google doesn't exactly need a sign to know they've made it, but you get my point. The more other businesses use your business as the basis for their business model, the more they barnacle on to your business, the more staying power you're going to have. Suddenly, it's not just a question of how well you serve the customer; other people are invested in your success and will do whatever they can to keep you going.

Take, for example, Surf Canyon. Their handy browser add-on digs into Google results to pull relevant links from further down the SERPs -- good for searchers, but also good for the sites, which would otherwise remain in ignominy.

Surf Canyon is just one of the many businesses that go there but for the grace of Google -- our own Web Genome Project is another -- but Google is big enough to expect barnacles as a matter of course. So let's shift focus: when you look at up-and-comers on the Web, one of the first things to find out is whether they have the potential to create barnacles of their own.

This has always been one of Facebook's key selling points: the ability for -- and inclination of -- others to create apps on its platform. Twitter's going down the same route as Facebook; barnacle OneRiot is banking on out-Twitter-searching Twitter itself.

Before you applaud my genius and send me flowers, I have to confess I'm not the first to recognize this barnacle principle (although I may be the first to call it that). Marc Andreessen wrote about this in June of 2007, saying "Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win..." The platform wins because of what people build on top of it. If people are building on what you do, whether or not you call yourself a platform, you're going to win.

Google should send a thank-you note to every one of its barnacles. They're part of what makes the Big G what it is. And if you've got barnacles, make sure to appreciate them. They might not be good for boats, but they're great for business.