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Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by nkozyra on Thursday April 19, 2018 @02:10PM (#16878426)
> The cynical side of me says that Facebook realized awhile ago that the API was NOT helping them making any more money.

This is so hard to quantify. A developer ecosystem around your product helps build engagement and lock-in. It provides free testing ground for experiments with your data (for better or worse).

A lot of people look at this as a "gift" to the developer community, but the relationship is symbiotic.

Now, given where Facebook is, am I surprised? Hell no. Billions of investors' dollars went away (temporarily, surely) almost overnight[1]. Their reputation took a hit. They needed to do ... something, anything. I get that.

But they didn't take a smart approach, likely because of the time constraint. The smart approach is lock down the parts of the graph that have the largest vectors for privacy invasion. Instead, they just hit the STOP button and are apparently calling it a day. In fact, there are some conflicting reports on some endpoints that officially will be up for review but privately have been discussed as permanently deprecated. I expect a walled garden.

We saw this with Twitter for different reasons. The lesson - as a developer/entrepreneur - should be: never make another company a mission critical component of your own. If there's a rug to be pulled out from under you, one day it will be.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/facebook-has-lost-60-billi...

Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by babesh on Thursday April 19, 2018 @03:16PM (#16879121)
The developer ecosystem served its purpose for FB. It accelerated their growth to the mass market. It is probably a net negative nowadays. They have an ad business not a platform business.
Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by nkozyra on Thursday April 19, 2018 @04:20PM (#16879743)
> The developer ecosystem served its purpose for FB

Maybe, maybe not.

Let's say tomorrow InstaFaceSpace launches and gets a bunch of hype. You know, it's got shiny fonts and your mom's not a user yet.

There's a migration, just as there was from Friendster->MySpace->Facebook. InstaFaceSpace is open for developers, giving them the tools they need to make and monetize applications on top of their platform. Stop me if you've heard this one before ...

Let's say this is embraced and there's some tangible migration. Apps are being built on InstaFaceSpace - cool apps, fun apps, secure and privacy-ensured apps.

Now Facebook realizes they need to have the platform they threw away and its ecosystem to retain users. Now what? Can they say "hey come back we've got all this new stuff and these hot new endpoints?" Developers won't go back.

It leaves Facebook vulnerable. Perhaps not as vulnerable as the PR nightmare they're going through, but there are scenarios where it comes close.

Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by AznHisoka on Thursday April 19, 2018 @04:26PM (#16879808)
Were apps really the reason for the growth FB experienced in the past decade?

I'd argue it was the apps (and the publishers) that led to the decrease of organic posting in Facebook. Instead of seeing posts from your friends, now you see viral articles, and app-related statuses.

Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by babesh on Thursday April 19, 2018 @07:27PM (#16881048)
It was one of the reasons and an inflection point. I remember the rush of activity with the release of the platform. People were poking each other and sending game requests. These were all FB apps. It was one in of a string of hits by FB, creating a lot of goodwill. They quickly released FB to many languages, often crowdsourcing them.
Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by babesh on Thursday April 19, 2018 @07:12PM (#16880966)
They've fracked with their developers so many times already. What's one more time going to do? I think many developers remember what FB has done in the past. They've changed virality, forced the use of FB credits, limited access to newsfeed, released really broken APIs, etc...
Re:API and Other Platform Product Changes by return1 on Friday April 20, 2018 @10:26AM (#16884998)
blocked adsense ads with flimsy excuses .. that one was particularly funny