I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
O’Reilly and his team just came out with some thorough research on the Facebook Platform, confirming my every post on the subject for the past three months:
- That the Platform is a bad deal for developers and is amazing for Facebook itself
- That we’d all be better off (Facebook too!) if they handed over their social graph
- That Facebook apps aren’t getting as much action as some people want to think
- And that new start-ups are better off designing their apps off platform and utilizing the graph as best they can until they open up (my post being that they need to open up, or die a slow, MSFT-style death
The main point that gets me riled up is that you’re no more likely to do well on the Facebook Platform than on the damn WWW platform. It’s just plain and simple. All you’re asking for is constraints and wrenches.
What kind of wrenches? Check out this news today that Facebook is going to come out with their own music store. Quick, how many Facebook apps labeled “Music” just went out of business? 243, or nearly 5% of the whole FB appverse. When FB offers their own add network to app publishers, how many Facebook ad networks will go out of business? Half. More? Who knows — it’s just a bad deal.
Okay — that’s it. I don’t want to talk about Facebook for another few weeks. I’m tired of being right on this issue.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Mark Mayhew // Oct 6, 2007 at 2:17 am
hey, you’re not a Facebook Fanboy? Cool, but you shoulda posted the numbers (from the report):
84 apps generate 87% of the traffic, and only 45 apps have more than 100,000 users.
2 Nate Westheimer // Oct 6, 2007 at 9:28 am
Thanks for posting the stats.
3 I was right. Facebook is spun. // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:46 am
[...] right, I found that they weren’t using them. I say “found,” by the way, because O’Reilly confirmed this first 3 months later with some data on app usage and then again 7 months later, in its widely [...]
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