The way that Facebook is continually growing and expanding into the fringes of new marketplaces means that there's a plethora of start-ups and incumbents alike that are potentially facing new (and possibly debilitating) competition in the near future. Indeed, anyone with a marketshare in search, social media, or file sharing may soon find themselves competing with Facebook. While the plight of some are hopless, many more face the unsavory prospect of becoming ancillary to Facebook. That is, they might end up relying on The Book to serve up a widget that was once based on its own unique user base.

Well, the people/business search engine ZoomInfo is similarly fending off The Book, and it's doing so by following its lead. Unlike LinkedIn who fought Facebook with Facebook, however, ZoomInfo is fighting on its own terms. Rather than creating a widget for use on a potential competitor's site, ZoomInfo is mimicking that competitor by opening up its own API. As the press release explains, moreover, there are already some large names availing itself of it:

Waltham, MA (PRWEB) September 6, 2007 -- ZoomInfo™ has launched a dedicated developer zone to provide several tools for developers to create applications leveraging ZoomInfo’s semantic search capabilities and people and company information. The developer zone, http://developer.zoominfo.com, features ZoomInfo’s public API, full documentation, a support forum and blog, and is a showcase for newly created ZoomInfo API applications. Companies including Amazon A9, Compete and Xing are already working with the beta version of the API.
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“We realized that there are countless uses for the type of business information that ZoomInfo provides on companies, people and industries,” said Russell Glass, vice president of products and marketing at ZoomInfo. “By providing a public API, our goal is to encourage new and innovative uses of our data and search capabilities. We look forward to seeing how creative the development community will be.”

Earlier today, I speculated that people search was killed in the womb by Facebook's decision to make user profiles searchable. Despite minor opposition by users, this move makes it all that much more plausible that Facebook becoming the next Google.

Essentially, ZommInfo's best chance at remaining competitive lies in establishing partnerships with very large and well established portals. Basically, by helping other incumbent players remain competitive with Google and/or Facebook, ZommInfo's chances of survival will increase to equal those of their (larger) partners. There is strength in numbers, and ZommInfo's niche is one that appeals to both Google (a search engine) and Facebook (a directory of people). If they can form a symbiotic relationship with one of the other incumbent levithans, then, they can preserve their market share.