Comments on: facebook redux http://blog.eliduke.com/2007/07/23/facebook-redux/ Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:05:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: eli http://blog.eliduke.com/2007/07/23/facebook-redux/#comment-3636 Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:19:44 +0000 http://elisfanclub.com/2007/07/23/facebook-redux/#comment-3636 i get it… french class! i see it now.

]]> By: shaners http://blog.eliduke.com/2007/07/23/facebook-redux/#comment-3628 Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:28:59 +0000 http://elisfanclub.com/2007/07/23/facebook-redux/#comment-3628 evan, abby and i talked about this a bunch on while we were in traffic.

the thing that evan said that really articulate a lot of my feelings regarding the Facebook Platform was this: “A platform exists so that others can add value to Facebook. An API exists so that Facebook can add value to others.” that’s the big distinction; the direction of the relationship.

imagine a world of lots of platforms. it’s easy to see how expensive it becomes to build/re-build your application/widget for each one. imagine the twitter application/widget has to be built and maintained for 15 different platforms, all of which are a little (or a lot) different in the implementation details.

pretty quickly, twitter is spending all their time on these widgets for other people’s platforms rather than developing the core app itself. it’s similar to desktop operating systems.

let’s say that there are 3 main operating systems: Mac OS X, Windows and misc unix variants (i know it’s more complicated than that). very few software developers build for all of those and that’s only three! multiple that by 5 and things just get worse.

one other thing, the direction of the relationship doesn’t have to be one-way. look at amazon.com. they’ve created an API that lets outside apps do almost anything that amazon proper can do. that has added value to any number of outside applications (Delicious Libaray is a good example), but value has also been added back to amazon by this too.

this couldn’t've happened if it was merely an amazon platform. it’s too much of a gamble and too restrictive to bet so much on one player, even a big one (especially a big one). like video game software companies and their console maker counterparts. companies that went with Xbox 360 or playstation are locked into that platform and the decisions that microsoft or sony makes for them, like the price of the console. so if the platform goes sour, the software companies go with it.

whereas, withsomething like amazon’s api, if the mothership (amazon in this case) goes totally belly up, the users of the api don’t have to scramble quite so much. vendor lock-in == bad!

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