Countless column inches have been dedicated to the meteoric rise of technology services such as Uber, Spotify, Netflix and Airbnb that are springing up, seemingly out of nowhere, and making life difficult for the established titans of their respective industries.

But there’s one super-power lurking behind all these start-ups, fuelling the astronomical growth of the app economy: Facebook.

Through the Facebook Platform, which provides developers with the creative and analytic tools to build, grow and monetise their companies, the social network claims to be one of the major forces shaking up classic business models.

And at its epicentre is Julien Codorniou, a soft-spoken, floppy-haired optimist who hails from Gruissan, a fishing village on the south coast of France that had roughly 1,300 inhabitants when he was born.

Now, Codorniou is Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, managing relationships with countless companies using Facebook's platform to reach the social network's almost 1.5bn users.

Facebook Platform launched in 2007 with the purpose of allowing developers to create external content such as games and news to be played and consumed on Facebook.com. Within a year, around 30,000 apps existed on Facebook, and later the Menlo Park-based company unlocked the platform so that anyone could build an app designed to exist outside of the website.

Today, any app that connects with Facebook's worldwide community of 1.49bn monthly active users – around a fifth of the global population – is considered to be part of the Facebook platform, and a tool as simple as "Login with Facebook" has allowed millions of apps to piggyback on the social network's ready-made audience of half the world's internet users.

The social network, which just reached $4bn in quarterly revenues for the first time, has grown its monthly users by 13pc over the last year and its daily users by 17pc. One out of every five minutes spent on a smartphone in the US is now spent on a Facebook app.

“When people think of the Facebook platform they think of a gaming platform on the web,” such as Farmville or Candy Crush, Codorniou told the Telegraph. “Nobody connects the dots when they see Airbnb, Uber and Spotify that Facebook is behind each of these companies. But that’s the ambition – we want to fuel their growth, even if it is invisible to the user.”

David Fuller's view

Here is a PDF of the article.

I showed my age in describing Facebook as a frivolous company after it was floated.  However, in the last two years I have also said that starting with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has brilliant management. 

This is confirmed by its share price and earnings growth.  Nevertheless, Facebook (est p/e 45.66 & yield n.a.) is not cheap.  It has also been temporarily overextended over the last month and may complete its current consolidation closer to the MA, as we have seen on previous occasions.  Overextended conditions warrant some temporary profit taking because these momentum moves periodically mean revert towards their 200-day (40-week) MAs.