11–20 of 45 posts
Before we adorn our tinfoil hats and assume that the first thing the Facebook "Biz Dev" guys look at in the morning is their API stats, maybe this is an exercise in "Empowering" internal employees to work on side projects not directly associated with their core product. It also lends for a great headline about their dev culture which in turn attracts more dev talent.
This is true of any API from a for-profit company, just look at the problems with Google Maps and Twitter. If I were making a startup today, I would not piggy back off any of these social APIs for this reason.
If you are as confused by OPs talking about 800lb gorillas and soforth as I was: Snapchat is a picture sharing application that uses facebook's API. Poke is a competitor that facebook made. OP is implying that facebook saw Snapchat's beginning success by seeing how many API calls they were making and then copied snapchat, instead of buying them. Thus: OP is implying that Facebook uses its API to see up-and-comers in…
If you are as confused by OPs talking about 800lb gorillas and soforth as I was: Snapchat is a picture sharing application that uses facebook's API. Poke is a competitor that facebook made. OP is implying that facebook saw Snapchat's beginning success by seeing how many API calls they were making and then copied snapchat, instead of buying them. Thus: OP is implying that Facebook uses its API to see up-and-comers in…
So here's something that just happened 5 minutes ago. A girl I've been snapchatting with texted me and asked why the Poke app is just like snapchat. I asked her if it was better, and she said 'I haven't used it much, but it looks much better', and now we're using it instead of snapchat. Pretty fascinating. She downloaded the app because they're advertising it on their mobile app.
The Apple app store rankings are public though... so couldn't anyone have seen that the app was doing well, and cloned it? Beyond raw resources, Facebook's big advantages seem to be its well-known brand and its ability to incubate new properties. That brand won't always help though - in some cases, a focused brand will have an advantage. And a viral property could negate Facebook's distribution advantages - although…
This is true of any API from a for-profit company, just look at the problems with Google Maps and Twitter. If I were making a startup today, I would not piggy back off any of these social APIs for this reason.
Can you tell us how much of the FB API SnapChat was using and if there's a "safe" way to take advantage of FB Graph and other features without leaking too much detail to FB?
So here's something that just happened 5 minutes ago. A girl I've been snapchatting with texted me and asked why the Poke app is just like snapchat. I asked her if it was better, and she said 'I haven't used it much, but it looks much better', and now we're using it instead of snapchat. Pretty fascinating. She downloaded the app because they're advertising it on their mobile app.
They possibly knew she used Snapchat, too.
that said, at some point there's a tradeoff between being a marketplace for 3rd-party apps and seeking to win with your own proprietary apps across the board.
If you are as confused by OPs talking about 800lb gorillas and soforth as I was: Snapchat is a picture sharing application that uses facebook's API. Poke is a competitor that facebook made. OP is implying that facebook saw Snapchat's beginning success by seeing how many API calls they were making and then copied snapchat, instead of buying them. Thus: OP is implying that Facebook uses its API to see up-and-comers in…