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The sad story of Facebook Platform

pandodaily.com

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Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#21

Post by austenallred »

It's worth noting that a lot of the apps that Facebook "killed off" (iLike, Social Reader, RockYou, Zynga games, etc.) really did detract from the user experience. Let's take Washington Post's Social Reader as a case study. You had to authorize the app in order to read the articles (that were often loaded with linkbait-y titles), and any time you did read (or click on) an article it automatically shared it with all of your Facebook friends. Zynga is another example; I'm sure I wasn't the only one constantly bombarded with invites to Whateverville. I had to unfriend some people to avoid them, because there was no way to turn them off.

It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was, "You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends." Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets.

Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself, but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#22

Post by aaronbrethorst »

This is ridiculous. Facebook is the de facto identity provider for a large fraction of mobile and web. If Facebook had let their platform continue in the original direction it was going, it would've choked off their core value prop (social networking) with spam.

And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too. Spotify, for instance, is only as popular as it is because of its early integration with Facebook.

Could FB have handled their platform better? Yes absolutely. The constant API changes and failures caused no end of headaches for developers and significantly reduced their platform's value. But, I think the claims in this article are ridiculous.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#23

Post by btipling »

Eduard wrote: post #12
mratzloff wrote: post #5

Facebook made three clear mistakes: - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. - Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks). - Breaking things con…

My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning. When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: https://developers.facebook.co…

2008-2009 I dealt with the Facebook API and they often broke things. The breaking changes notifications have improved things, but they still break things. Their insight analytics was broken for about a year. They just don't seem to care about their API.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#25

Post by mathattack »

I think the "Release now, figure it out later" came to haunt them. By accepting so many crappy apps, the overall experience declined. They also got no revenue out of it. Yes, some of the 3rd party apps were leeches on the motherships. Many more were innocent victims. Now we have an environment of diminishing utilization, and no apps. How many people really use Facebook now more than 12 months ago? Or 3 years ago?

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#26

Post by s3r3nity »

What many people don't know is that the motto never was intended to be "move fast & break things." Rather, it's "move fast and don't be afraid to break things." Slightly less bold, yes, but definitely more empowering to feel confident and not be afraid to take risks.

There's a bit of internal debate that now that the phrase has been shortened that it's used as an excuse to be sloppy for the sake of "getting shit done" (as they say at Box). Still, given that I used to work at places where mistakes were consistently held against you, I like the idealism here.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#27

Post by tokenadult »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #22

This is ridiculous. Facebook is the de facto identity provider for a large fraction of mobile and web. If Facebook had let their platform continue in the original direction it was going, it would've choked off their core value prop (social networking) with spam. And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too. Spotify, for instance, is only as popular as it is because of its early integrat…

And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too.

Where I come from, "significant value" for a businessperson is defined as earnings (profit). I am aware (from other posts to HN) that some developers of some apps on Facebook, and some advertisers on Facebook, think Facebook is a new environment for their businesses that provides new opportunities to profit. But is that the general experience? Is the Facebook ecosystem as a whole a profitable ecosystem that allows third-party companies hosted on that ecosystem to profit, and meanwhile allows Facebook to profit?

As I have written before here on HN, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it. I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me."

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#28

Post by mratzloff »

Eduard wrote: post #12
mratzloff wrote: post #5

Facebook made three clear mistakes: - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. - Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks). - Breaking things con…

My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning. When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: https://developers.facebook.co…

2007-2008.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#29

Post by johnward »

mratzloff wrote: post #5

Facebook made three clear mistakes: - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. - Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks). - Breaking things con…

Revenue stream was a pretty big miss. Devs weren't offered a share of the facebook ads income for views on their apps and they had no way to fund paid apps. So 3rd parties came in to cover the gap and then Facebook didn't like it so they started banning them or trying to force their own half baked solutions.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#30

Post by scholia »

sidcool wrote: post #11

I have had a difficult reading relationship with pandodaily. After some good initial articles, they started producing trash. This article, for a change, is reasonably good.

Same with Verge. A lot of sites are following Business Insider and Mashable down the high-volume shit-chute because that's how you make money when people won't pay for stuff.
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