In September 2011, Facebook made a breakthrough change and introduced Custom Actions for Open Graph. At that time, users did not know anything about it but it was hell of an opportunity to fill users’ timelines with activity posts and gain lots of users. Here is a story why Facebook gave a chance to developers and now how will they use this to eat social startups:

Some background

At that time, a social app called Path was announced by cool guys in SF, but it wasn’t a hit since it was nothing more than an app you can post pictures and tag your Facebook friends on it.

Then me and two friends of mine sat and thought that we can definitely do better than that.

In our mobile social network you can pick an action (eating, drinking, buying, watching, listening or playing) then you add a picture, you tag your Facebook friends, you pick a location and share this activity, then it propagates to your Facebook and Twitter. Already a better idea than Path!

We were doing this idea 51% as a graduation project at college and 49% as a startup (without a revenue model). Halfway through development Path relaunched its v2.0 and they did what we were planning to do, for instance, idea of posting different types of activities, finding venues from Foursquare instead of FB Places, playing music previews from iTunes.

We launched ours anyway. It’s been a year, right now only a few people use it but that does not matter. We, 3 college students, have proven ourselves and others that we can do this stuff and we can get better at it, indeed. That was the story of my social startup attempt.

How Facebook will eat other social networks

At the time of launching, Open Graph was already a brilliant idea. It connects people and any other object in the world or in the web. You have seen that how successful it has been in Graph Search.

A few days ago, Facebook announced this:

Facebook Tries Letting You Share Emoticons Of Exactly What You’re Feeling, Reading Or Eating

That was nothing more than several mobile social network startups combined (including mine!). Of course, the idea may seem trivial right now, but it was a good idea one and a half years ago. That’s why we did it in the first place.

Now if Facebook launches this, imagine what happens to Path, GetGlue, Goodreads, Foodspotting, my startup and many others. Many established and emerging social startups would be smashed with Facebook’s power. People “need” to post what they have watched, ate, bought. These are great conversation starters and Facebook figured it out!

Two years ago, Facebook offered a great deal to developers. Many startups and products had chance to spread the word using their users and customers on Facebook. Now Facebook knows what you can do on Open Graph and the best ideas will get (re-)implemented by Facebook. Well done, indeed.