The Dangers of Relying on Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#31

Post by bruce511 » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 3:05 PM UTC

ignifero wrote: post #17

dansingerman wrote: post #3

As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours. By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

You do not rely on other companies only when you rely on open standards. Web development is an example (although you indirectly rely on Google for example). All kinds of apps usually rely on an underlying commercial technology ( windows development, osx development, ios development) whose actions are outside your control.

>> although you indirectly rely on Google for example

huh? how do you figure that?

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#32

Post by kwantam » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 3:13 PM UTC

dtby wrote: post #28

revetkn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like quanticle said, social networking. You can't say, "fuck this, I'll just integrate with myspace instead" without getting laughed out of the room. Like it or not, Facebook's the only game in town.

Like quanticle said, social networking. My problem is that is not a real thing which can be monopolized. I promise I'm not being (intentionally) obtuse here. I don't understand which piece of an online offering requires Facebook. Maybe an example would help me.

Specifically with respect to the OP, they have a gigantic datastore of their users' social graphs. That's a "real thing" that can be monopolized: their users' data.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#33

Post by neutronicus » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 3:50 PM UTC

aaronmarks wrote: post #14

dansingerman wrote: post #3

As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours. By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

This seems like a really valid and important point. Yet companies who do build their entire business on other companies' info / APIS (Think Greplin, Trendrr, Tweetdeck, etc.) still get tons of interest from investors. While it is easy to realize the importance of developing an independent business when commenting on HN, I think the startup community as a whole needs to start displaying this in its actions. Once more…

Greplin et al always have the exit scenario where their product is so much better than whatever (say) Facebook has in-house that Facebook buys them as a social-search talent-acquisition play.

This sort of scenario might be easier to identify and invest in than "the next Facebook".

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#34

Post by ignifero » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 4:01 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #31

ignifero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not rely on other companies only when you rely on open standards. Web development is an example (although you indirectly rely on Google for example). All kinds of apps usually rely on an underlying commercial technology ( windows development, osx development, ios development) whose actions are outside your control.

>> although you indirectly rely on Google for example huh? how do you figure that?

Thats why it says indirectly. Google can harm your traffic if they want to

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#35

Post by ignifero » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #22

ignifero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not rely on other companies only when you rely on open standards. Web development is an example (although you indirectly rely on Google for example). All kinds of apps usually rely on an underlying commercial technology ( windows development, osx development, ios development) whose actions are outside your control.

The Facebook app and Windows app scenarios are not comparable. Microsoft knows that the only reason Windows has succeeded as much as it has is because of its vast and deep pool of applications. As such, there is an incentive for Microsoft to allow a relative amount of freedom when developing Windows applications. Indeed, a bare operating system is quite useless without applications to run on it. Facebook, on the othe…

Facebook became popular without apps, true, but they have yet to prove how successful they are. Zynga is more profitable than facebook itself, that must mean something. It's just speculation, but i believe things will change as growth starts to plateau and everyone has caught up with their old schoolmates. As for microsoft, well, remember netscape.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#36

Post by contextfree » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:25 PM UTC

One way to think of this is that if you are a regular employee of a company, you are 100% dependent on them for your work, but you also have a lot of things taken care of for you (one hopes). If you have a startup, but it's heavily dependent on some platform, you are maybe not completely dependent on them in the same way, but less independent than if you had your own infrastructure. There's sort of a continuum here.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#37

Post by zguy » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:03 PM UTC

Yep, you should just read the TOS and be prepared for the worst ;)

I'm trying to reduce my dependencies to a bare minimum. I implement most of the features I need by myself. I need the users, just it.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#38

Post by JGuo » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 9:12 PM UTC

The pixamid situation is similar to the reason the breakup notifier got banned by Facebook originally. A large amount of users were deleting wall posts made by the app, causing the app to get flagged and automatically shutdown temporarily.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#39

Post by code_duck » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 9:19 PM UTC

This is pretty much my experience of basing a business on another company in such a way. Besides having learned my lesson about that, it's left me leary of everything from using cloud-style servers to outsourcing features such as comments.

You can get a big boost up from leveraging another company's assets, but you're left in a very vulnerable position - at their mercy in several ways. I'm striving to make all future endeavors as independent as possible.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#40

Post by code_duck » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 9:22 PM UTC

dtby wrote: post #28

revetkn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like quanticle said, social networking. You can't say, "fuck this, I'll just integrate with myspace instead" without getting laughed out of the room. Like it or not, Facebook's the only game in town.

Like quanticle said, social networking. My problem is that is not a real thing which can be monopolized. I promise I'm not being (intentionally) obtuse here. I don't understand which piece of an online offering requires Facebook. Maybe an example would help me.

I agree, there's nothing that requires facebook yet, and I hope developers realize the importance of keeping things that way, and stop integrating FB's services while there is still a choice.