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Facebook platform backlash?
June 30, 2007
Could a nascent backlash swamp Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of turning Facebook into the next big web plaftform?
Yesterday, Valleywag published a lengthy breakdown of some of the percevied faults of Facebook’s platform strategy, at least in its current form. They include tiddly applications, unreliable servers, and, perhaps most importantly, concerns about Facebook changing the rules on developers in the middle of the game.
This last concern stems from the company’s decision to restrict the number of invitations users can send out to their friends to advertise a newly-downloaded widget. Although the move was taken to prevent rogue developers from spamming users with application invites, some programmers are saying it has made it difficult for newer applications to get noticed.
Now that Facebook has changed the rules around invites, some developers are concerned it might intervene elsewhere. As one entrepreneur put it:
Say you have 10 million active users of a Facebook app that is making tons of money. If Facebook decides they want that money, they can make their app the default. On the web, you’re never that vulnerable. Facebook may or may not ever try to crush successful applications, but from an acquisition or investment perspective, that risk is definitely going to have to be figured in.
This is the dilemma that software developers faced for years when dealing with Microsoft.
Whether or not Facebook pulls such shenanigans on its developers is irrelevant. The risk that it could happen is what counts. In the end, this is probably not a dealbreaker. But as long as Facebook continues to work on its own apps, it’s a risk outside developers and their investors will have to keep in mind.
