8.3 Lessons from Facebook as an Apps Platform: Early
Promise, Continued Challenges, Mobile Missteps
At the firm’s first f8 developers conference, Facebook published a set of application
programming interfaces Programming hooks, or guidelines, published by firms that tell other
programs how to get a service to perform a task such as send or receive data. For example,
Amazon provides application programming interfaces (APIs) to let developers write their own
applications and Web sites that can send the firm orders. (APIs) that specified how programs
could be written to run within and interact with Facebook. Essentially Zuck was opening up
Facebook screen real estate, user base and features like Feed to the world’s developers. Now, any
programmer could write an application that would live inside a user’s profile. Developers could
charge for their wares, offer them for free, or even run ads. Facebook lets developers keep
earnings through their apps (Facebook does revenue share with app vendors for some services—
for example, taking 30 percent of virtual goods sales transacted through the site). Apps could be
cobbled together quickly; news feeds made them spread like wildfire and the early movers
offered adoption rates never before seen by small groups of software developers. And for
Facebook, becoming a platform meant that each new third-party app potentially added more
value and features to the site without Facebook lifting a finger (which, in a prior chapter, we
learned about as value-adding complementary benefits from network effects).
There were some missteps along the way. Some applications were accused of spamming friends
with invites to install them (Facebook eventually put limits on viral communication from apps).
There were also security concerns, privacy leaks, and apps that violated the intellectual property
of other firms (see the “Errant Apps and the Challenges of Running a Platform” sidebar), but
Facebook worked to quickly remove misbehaving apps, correct errors, improve the system, and
encourage developers. Just one year in, Facebook had marshaled the efforts of some 400,000
developers and entrepreneurs, 24,000 applications had been built for the platform, 140 new apps
were being added each day, and 95 percent of Facebook members had installed at least one
Facebook application.
Despite the explosion of interest in Facebook platform, the top category Just for Fun was larger
than the next four categories combined; and within that category, many of the early winners were
starting to look like flash-in-the-pan fads. Once-promising start-ups Slide and iLike shriveled,
eventually selling to Facebook rivals Google and MySpace for smaller figures than their onetime valuations. [4] Many developers would complain of being “Zucked over,” [5] claiming that
Facebook became a poor partner making surreptitious platform changes, altering policies without
consulting them, and taking away much of the virality that helped fuel the firm’s initial app
explosion;
Game maker Zynga’s woes may have been unusually acute. The firm had scrapped an earlier
agreement that gave it preferred status in the Facebook News Feed, and a revamp to Facebook’s
feed-ranking algorithm subsequently caused a significant portion of Zynga traffic to be screened out. [6] While Zynga’s IPO debuted at $10 a share and was once one of the most valuable video
game firms on the planet, [7] the firm’s share price fell below $3 roughly a year and a half after its
debut as a public firm. Nearly 20 percent of its workforce had been fired, users were fleeing
games, and profits had vanished. [8] Still, while Zynga faltered, King.com (maker of Candy Crush
Saga) surged. The firm had three of the four most popular games on Facebook in 2013; [9] it saw
150 million monthly active users and over a billion plays each day. [10]
Despite King’s success, Facebook’s mobile gaming revenues were down a full 11 percent
compared to a year earlier; [11] Facebook itself admits the benefit of thinking beyond Facebookonly games. According to the firm, revenues are 3.3 times higher from cross-platform games
than those developed only for Facebook’s browser environment on the PC, and user engagement
is 40 percent higher for games played on both mobile devices and PCs. [12] The shift to mobile,
the inability to run Facebook apps within a Facebook mobile app, and changing expectations
within the developer community have all conspired to stagnate the Facebook platform. Mobile is Tougher, But Global Players Have Big Mobile
Platforms
Certain technical aspects of the smartphone ecosystem put the brakes on Facebook’s fast-paced
“done is better than perfect” culture. On the Web, Facebook can test an innovation by rolling it
out to a subset of users and gauging their reaction. But this so-called A/B testing is harder with
mobile. Google and Apple release apps and updates to all of their users at once, so experimental
feature testing with a subset of users is far more difficult to accomplish on a mobile phone. The
app updating process is also usually slower than the instant “it’s here” that occurs when visiting a
Web page that automatically loads the latest version on a server, making fixes for app
development mistakes more challenging to distribute. [13]
While Facebook suffered to bring its platform to mobile, it should be noted that several global
messaging apps are directly accessing user address books and building their own app platforms
from within iOS and Android. These include South Korea’s KakaoTalk, Japan’s Line, and most
notably, China’s massive WeChat. At roughly 550 million users in mid-2015, WeChat (owned by
Shenzhen-based Tencent) is behind only to WhatsApp and Faceboko Messenger in messaging,
[14]
but the firm’s open platform supports digital payments, shopping, gaming, banking, Uberstyle taxi service, [15] and open access to third-party developers. [16] One analyst says “Weixin
[what WeChat is called in China] is basically the mobile Internet for China.” Food delivery
startup Call-A-Chicken raised $1.6 million without a website; it doesn’t need one because it does
all of its business through Weixin. [17] It’s worth noting that profitable Tencent had 2014 revenues
of $12.9 billion, with a $200 billion market cap, numbers roughly in line with Facebook’s size. Messenger: A Pillar Business Building Facebook’s Future
Zuckerberg claims messaging is “one of the few things that people actually do more than social
networking” making it a must-win for his firm. [19] While Facebook ponied up some serious
dinero for WhatsApp and Instagram, its home-grown Messanger is on a tear. Many questioned
the firm’s unbundling of Messenger, splitting it as a separate stand-alone from the Facebook app, [20] but today Messenger boasts 700 million users, [21] with over 1 billion downloads for Android
alone. [22] In messaging, only WhatsApp is bigger.
To help Messenger realize its potential, Zuckerberg turned on the sales charm and did what many
thought impossible: he poached the CEO of another thriving, high-growth, industry leading firm,
PayPal. David Marcus left the helm of PayPal, where he led 15,000 employees to run
Messenger’s group of fewer than 100 employees. Marcus now runs PayPal like a separate
business (not unlike Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus), but pulls in Facebook’s scaled-for-abillion-users resources when needed. [23]
The once-scrawny Messenger has bulked up, and now includes key features of other leading
messaging apps: group messaging, stickers, location sharing, notifications if your message has
been seen, recording and sending audio messages. It’s also a Skype competitor, offering free
VoIP (Voice over IP) Internet calls. Under Marcus, Messenger has also expanded to become a
tool for corporations to communicate with customers. Firms can now use Facebook to send
customer updates (receipts, shipping information), and can use Messenger for customer support
chat. Firms are finding Messenger especially attractive in the wake of Gmail segregating
“Promotions and Offers” to a separate tab, a function that often hides time-sensitive
communication. [24] Such reasons may have motivated flash-sales site Zulily to sign up as one of
the first firms working through Messenger. [25] If Messenger can find that delicate balance of
service but not spam, it may evolve as a critical business-to-consumer communication channel.
And taking a page from Asia’s top messaging apps, such as WeChat and Line, Facebook has
introduced a platform that allows developers to build their products that integrate directly via
Messenger. The first implementation isn’t great and adoption was sluggish. [27] Apps were
initially tough to find, requiring users to click on the ellipses ("…") button during a chat session
to uncover the Messenger app store. And offerings were skimpy (stickers, photo editors, soundclips). [28] But games followed (first up was a Pictionary/DrawSomething-clone called Doodle
Draw). The App store is overcrowded, so Messenger could help developers stand out, but only if
they apply the lessons of limiting game spam learned from Facebook’s maturity as a platform for
browser games. [29] If Facebook can turn Messenger into a sort of must-use notification service
for app and firm outreach it can also co-opt a key role of the OS and further cement the firm into
all sorts of user experiences. If you can get shopping updates and info for your game-in-progress,
why not travel, bank, breaking news, or anything else?
It’s also worth noting that many of the lessons learned from Facebook’s browser platform, and its
mobile efforts, will help shed light on how to best build new platforms, like Oculus. It’s pretty
clear that Zuck is thinking beyond products to platforms as the bulwark of Facebook’s value-add
and future competitive strength. APIs, Playing Well with Others, and Value Added: The
Success and Impact of Open Graph
While Facebook’s in-browser apps platform has stalled, and Facebook is looking to mobile and
Messenger for further growth and innovation, another aspect of the Facebook platform, Facebook’s Open Graph, continues to project Facebook’s influence beyond the site itself. The
initiative allows developers to link Web pages and app usage into the social graph, placing
Facebook directly at the center of identity, sharing, and personalization—not only on Facebook
but also across the Web. Consider some examples of what Open Graph can do.
With just a few lines of HTML code specified by Open Graph, any developer can add a
Facebook “Like” button to his or her site and take advantage of the social network’s power of
viral distribution. When a user clicks that page’s “Like” button, it would automatically send a
link of that page to his or her news feed, where it has the potential to be seen by all of his or her
friends. No additional sign-in is necessary as long as you logged into Facebook first (reinforcing
Facebook’s importance as the first stop in your Internet surfing itinerary). The effort was adopted
with stunning speed. Facebook’s “Like” button was served up more than one billion times across
the Web in the first twenty-four hours, and over 50,000 websites signed up to add the “Like”
button to their content within the first week. (Facebook now includes several new verb options
beyond “Like.”) [30]
Facebook also offered a system where website operators can choose to accept a user’s Facebook
credentials for logging in. Users like this because they can access content without the hurdle of
creating a new account. Websites like it because with the burden of signing up out of the way,
Facebook becomes an experimentation lubricant: “Oh, I can use my Facebook ID to sign in?
Then let me try this out.”
Other efforts allow firms to leverage Facebook data to make their sites more personalized. Firms
around the Web can now show if a visitor’s friends have “Liked” items on the site, posted
comments, or performed other actions. Using this feature, Facebook users logging into Yelp can
see a list of restaurants recommended by trusted friends instead of just the reviews posted by a
bunch of strangers. Users of the music-streaming site Pandora can have the service customized
based on music tastes pulled from their Facebook profile page. They can share stations with
friends and have data flow back to update the music preferences listed in their Facebook profile
pages. When you visit CNN.com, the site can pull together a list of stories recommended by
friend. [31] Think about how this strengthens the social graph. While items in the news feed might
quickly scroll away and disappear, that data can now be pulled up within a website, providing
insight from friends when and where you’re likely to want it most.
When taken together, these features enlist websites to serve as vassal states in the Facebook
empire. Each of these ties makes Facebook membership more valuable by enhancing network
effects, strengthening switching costs, and creating larger sets of highly personalized data to
leverage. Strategic Concerns for Platform Builders: Asset Strength,
Free Riders, and Security
Facebook also allows third-party developers to create all sorts of apps to access Facebook data.
Facebook feeds are now streaming through these devices: Samsung, Vizio, and Sony smart
televisions; Xbox 360 and Wii game consoles; Verizon’s FiOS pay-television service; and the Amazon Kindle. While Facebook might never have the time or resources to create apps that put
its service on every gadget on the market, they don’t need to. Developers using Facebook’s
access tools will gladly pick up the slack.
But there are major challenges with a more open approach—most notably, a weakening of
strategic assets, revenue sharing, and security. First, let’s discuss the potential for weakened
assets. Mark Zuckerberg’s geeks have worked hard to make their site the top choice for most of
the world’s social networkers and social network application developers. Right now, everyone
goes to Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. But Facebook, or any firm that opens
up access to users and content, risks supporting efforts that undermine the critical assets of
network effects and switching costs. If you can get Facebook content on other sites, why go to
Facebook?
Related to asset weakening is the issue of revenue sharing. Hosting content (especially photos
and rich media) is a very expensive proposition. What incentive does a site have to store data if it
will just be sent to a third-party site that will run ads around this content and not share the take?
Too much data portability presents a free rider problem When others take advantage of a user or
service without providing any sort of reciprocal benefit. in which firms mooch off of Facebook’s
infrastructure without offering much in return. As an example of this tension, Facebook and
Twitter, firms once known for their openness, have begun to erect walls to make it more difficult
for users to integrate their services. Twitter users used to be able to click on an Instagram photo
and have it displayed directly in the Twitter app or in a pop-up window in Twitter-owned
TweetDeck, but doing so prevents Facebook from wrapping Instagram content in messages,
collecting “Likes,” and—although it doesn’t currently do so—running ads. Instagram also
blocked user ability to find friends on Twitter, while Facebook blocked Twitter users from
finding Facebook friends for the Twitter-owned video app, Vine. [32]
Finally, consider security. Allowing data streams that contain potentially private posts and
photographs to flow through the Internet and have them land where you want them raise all sorts
of concerns. What’s to say an errant line of code doesn’t provide a back door to your address
book or friends list, to your messaging account, or to photos you’d hoped to only share with
family? Security breaches can occur on any site, but once the data is allowed to flow freely,
every site with access is, for hackers, the equivalent of a potential door to open or window to
crawl through.
Facebook’s increasing dominance, long reach, and widening ambition have a lot of people
worried, including the creator of the World Wide Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently warned that
the Web may be endangered by Facebook’s colossal walled garden A closed network or single set
of services controlled by one dominant firm. A closed network or single set of services controlled
by one dominant firm. . [33] The fear is that if increasingly large parts of the Web reside inside a
single (and, for the most part, closed) service, innovation, competition, and exchange may suffer.
Promise, Continued Challenges, Mobile Missteps
At the firm’s first f8 developers conference, Facebook published a set of application
programming interfaces Programming hooks, or guidelines, published by firms that tell other
programs how to get a service to perform a task such as send or receive data. For example,
Amazon provides application programming interfaces (APIs) to let developers write their own
applications and Web sites that can send the firm orders. (APIs) that specified how programs
could be written to run within and interact with Facebook. Essentially Zuck was opening up
Facebook screen real estate, user base and features like Feed to the world’s developers. Now, any
programmer could write an application that would live inside a user’s profile. Developers could
charge for their wares, offer them for free, or even run ads. Facebook lets developers keep
earnings through their apps (Facebook does revenue share with app vendors for some services—
for example, taking 30 percent of virtual goods sales transacted through the site). Apps could be
cobbled together quickly; news feeds made them spread like wildfire and the early movers
offered adoption rates never before seen by small groups of software developers. And for
Facebook, becoming a platform meant that each new third-party app potentially added more
value and features to the site without Facebook lifting a finger (which, in a prior chapter, we
learned about as value-adding complementary benefits from network effects).
There were some missteps along the way. Some applications were accused of spamming friends
with invites to install them (Facebook eventually put limits on viral communication from apps).
There were also security concerns, privacy leaks, and apps that violated the intellectual property
of other firms (see the “Errant Apps and the Challenges of Running a Platform” sidebar), but
Facebook worked to quickly remove misbehaving apps, correct errors, improve the system, and
encourage developers. Just one year in, Facebook had marshaled the efforts of some 400,000
developers and entrepreneurs, 24,000 applications had been built for the platform, 140 new apps
were being added each day, and 95 percent of Facebook members had installed at least one
Facebook application.
Despite the explosion of interest in Facebook platform, the top category Just for Fun was larger
than the next four categories combined; and within that category, many of the early winners were
starting to look like flash-in-the-pan fads. Once-promising start-ups Slide and iLike shriveled,
eventually selling to Facebook rivals Google and MySpace for smaller figures than their onetime valuations. [4] Many developers would complain of being “Zucked over,” [5] claiming that
Facebook became a poor partner making surreptitious platform changes, altering policies without
consulting them, and taking away much of the virality that helped fuel the firm’s initial app
explosion;
Game maker Zynga’s woes may have been unusually acute. The firm had scrapped an earlier
agreement that gave it preferred status in the Facebook News Feed, and a revamp to Facebook’s
feed-ranking algorithm subsequently caused a significant portion of Zynga traffic to be screened out. [6] While Zynga’s IPO debuted at $10 a share and was once one of the most valuable video
game firms on the planet, [7] the firm’s share price fell below $3 roughly a year and a half after its
debut as a public firm. Nearly 20 percent of its workforce had been fired, users were fleeing
games, and profits had vanished. [8] Still, while Zynga faltered, King.com (maker of Candy Crush
Saga) surged. The firm had three of the four most popular games on Facebook in 2013; [9] it saw
150 million monthly active users and over a billion plays each day. [10]
Despite King’s success, Facebook’s mobile gaming revenues were down a full 11 percent
compared to a year earlier; [11] Facebook itself admits the benefit of thinking beyond Facebookonly games. According to the firm, revenues are 3.3 times higher from cross-platform games
than those developed only for Facebook’s browser environment on the PC, and user engagement
is 40 percent higher for games played on both mobile devices and PCs. [12] The shift to mobile,
the inability to run Facebook apps within a Facebook mobile app, and changing expectations
within the developer community have all conspired to stagnate the Facebook platform. Mobile is Tougher, But Global Players Have Big Mobile
Platforms
Certain technical aspects of the smartphone ecosystem put the brakes on Facebook’s fast-paced
“done is better than perfect” culture. On the Web, Facebook can test an innovation by rolling it
out to a subset of users and gauging their reaction. But this so-called A/B testing is harder with
mobile. Google and Apple release apps and updates to all of their users at once, so experimental
feature testing with a subset of users is far more difficult to accomplish on a mobile phone. The
app updating process is also usually slower than the instant “it’s here” that occurs when visiting a
Web page that automatically loads the latest version on a server, making fixes for app
development mistakes more challenging to distribute. [13]
While Facebook suffered to bring its platform to mobile, it should be noted that several global
messaging apps are directly accessing user address books and building their own app platforms
from within iOS and Android. These include South Korea’s KakaoTalk, Japan’s Line, and most
notably, China’s massive WeChat. At roughly 550 million users in mid-2015, WeChat (owned by
Shenzhen-based Tencent) is behind only to WhatsApp and Faceboko Messenger in messaging,
[14]
but the firm’s open platform supports digital payments, shopping, gaming, banking, Uberstyle taxi service, [15] and open access to third-party developers. [16] One analyst says “Weixin
[what WeChat is called in China] is basically the mobile Internet for China.” Food delivery
startup Call-A-Chicken raised $1.6 million without a website; it doesn’t need one because it does
all of its business through Weixin. [17] It’s worth noting that profitable Tencent had 2014 revenues
of $12.9 billion, with a $200 billion market cap, numbers roughly in line with Facebook’s size. Messenger: A Pillar Business Building Facebook’s Future
Zuckerberg claims messaging is “one of the few things that people actually do more than social
networking” making it a must-win for his firm. [19] While Facebook ponied up some serious
dinero for WhatsApp and Instagram, its home-grown Messanger is on a tear. Many questioned
the firm’s unbundling of Messenger, splitting it as a separate stand-alone from the Facebook app, [20] but today Messenger boasts 700 million users, [21] with over 1 billion downloads for Android
alone. [22] In messaging, only WhatsApp is bigger.
To help Messenger realize its potential, Zuckerberg turned on the sales charm and did what many
thought impossible: he poached the CEO of another thriving, high-growth, industry leading firm,
PayPal. David Marcus left the helm of PayPal, where he led 15,000 employees to run
Messenger’s group of fewer than 100 employees. Marcus now runs PayPal like a separate
business (not unlike Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus), but pulls in Facebook’s scaled-for-abillion-users resources when needed. [23]
The once-scrawny Messenger has bulked up, and now includes key features of other leading
messaging apps: group messaging, stickers, location sharing, notifications if your message has
been seen, recording and sending audio messages. It’s also a Skype competitor, offering free
VoIP (Voice over IP) Internet calls. Under Marcus, Messenger has also expanded to become a
tool for corporations to communicate with customers. Firms can now use Facebook to send
customer updates (receipts, shipping information), and can use Messenger for customer support
chat. Firms are finding Messenger especially attractive in the wake of Gmail segregating
“Promotions and Offers” to a separate tab, a function that often hides time-sensitive
communication. [24] Such reasons may have motivated flash-sales site Zulily to sign up as one of
the first firms working through Messenger. [25] If Messenger can find that delicate balance of
service but not spam, it may evolve as a critical business-to-consumer communication channel.
And taking a page from Asia’s top messaging apps, such as WeChat and Line, Facebook has
introduced a platform that allows developers to build their products that integrate directly via
Messenger. The first implementation isn’t great and adoption was sluggish. [27] Apps were
initially tough to find, requiring users to click on the ellipses ("…") button during a chat session
to uncover the Messenger app store. And offerings were skimpy (stickers, photo editors, soundclips). [28] But games followed (first up was a Pictionary/DrawSomething-clone called Doodle
Draw). The App store is overcrowded, so Messenger could help developers stand out, but only if
they apply the lessons of limiting game spam learned from Facebook’s maturity as a platform for
browser games. [29] If Facebook can turn Messenger into a sort of must-use notification service
for app and firm outreach it can also co-opt a key role of the OS and further cement the firm into
all sorts of user experiences. If you can get shopping updates and info for your game-in-progress,
why not travel, bank, breaking news, or anything else?
It’s also worth noting that many of the lessons learned from Facebook’s browser platform, and its
mobile efforts, will help shed light on how to best build new platforms, like Oculus. It’s pretty
clear that Zuck is thinking beyond products to platforms as the bulwark of Facebook’s value-add
and future competitive strength. APIs, Playing Well with Others, and Value Added: The
Success and Impact of Open Graph
While Facebook’s in-browser apps platform has stalled, and Facebook is looking to mobile and
Messenger for further growth and innovation, another aspect of the Facebook platform, Facebook’s Open Graph, continues to project Facebook’s influence beyond the site itself. The
initiative allows developers to link Web pages and app usage into the social graph, placing
Facebook directly at the center of identity, sharing, and personalization—not only on Facebook
but also across the Web. Consider some examples of what Open Graph can do.
With just a few lines of HTML code specified by Open Graph, any developer can add a
Facebook “Like” button to his or her site and take advantage of the social network’s power of
viral distribution. When a user clicks that page’s “Like” button, it would automatically send a
link of that page to his or her news feed, where it has the potential to be seen by all of his or her
friends. No additional sign-in is necessary as long as you logged into Facebook first (reinforcing
Facebook’s importance as the first stop in your Internet surfing itinerary). The effort was adopted
with stunning speed. Facebook’s “Like” button was served up more than one billion times across
the Web in the first twenty-four hours, and over 50,000 websites signed up to add the “Like”
button to their content within the first week. (Facebook now includes several new verb options
beyond “Like.”) [30]
Facebook also offered a system where website operators can choose to accept a user’s Facebook
credentials for logging in. Users like this because they can access content without the hurdle of
creating a new account. Websites like it because with the burden of signing up out of the way,
Facebook becomes an experimentation lubricant: “Oh, I can use my Facebook ID to sign in?
Then let me try this out.”
Other efforts allow firms to leverage Facebook data to make their sites more personalized. Firms
around the Web can now show if a visitor’s friends have “Liked” items on the site, posted
comments, or performed other actions. Using this feature, Facebook users logging into Yelp can
see a list of restaurants recommended by trusted friends instead of just the reviews posted by a
bunch of strangers. Users of the music-streaming site Pandora can have the service customized
based on music tastes pulled from their Facebook profile page. They can share stations with
friends and have data flow back to update the music preferences listed in their Facebook profile
pages. When you visit CNN.com, the site can pull together a list of stories recommended by
friend. [31] Think about how this strengthens the social graph. While items in the news feed might
quickly scroll away and disappear, that data can now be pulled up within a website, providing
insight from friends when and where you’re likely to want it most.
When taken together, these features enlist websites to serve as vassal states in the Facebook
empire. Each of these ties makes Facebook membership more valuable by enhancing network
effects, strengthening switching costs, and creating larger sets of highly personalized data to
leverage. Strategic Concerns for Platform Builders: Asset Strength,
Free Riders, and Security
Facebook also allows third-party developers to create all sorts of apps to access Facebook data.
Facebook feeds are now streaming through these devices: Samsung, Vizio, and Sony smart
televisions; Xbox 360 and Wii game consoles; Verizon’s FiOS pay-television service; and the Amazon Kindle. While Facebook might never have the time or resources to create apps that put
its service on every gadget on the market, they don’t need to. Developers using Facebook’s
access tools will gladly pick up the slack.
But there are major challenges with a more open approach—most notably, a weakening of
strategic assets, revenue sharing, and security. First, let’s discuss the potential for weakened
assets. Mark Zuckerberg’s geeks have worked hard to make their site the top choice for most of
the world’s social networkers and social network application developers. Right now, everyone
goes to Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. But Facebook, or any firm that opens
up access to users and content, risks supporting efforts that undermine the critical assets of
network effects and switching costs. If you can get Facebook content on other sites, why go to
Facebook?
Related to asset weakening is the issue of revenue sharing. Hosting content (especially photos
and rich media) is a very expensive proposition. What incentive does a site have to store data if it
will just be sent to a third-party site that will run ads around this content and not share the take?
Too much data portability presents a free rider problem When others take advantage of a user or
service without providing any sort of reciprocal benefit. in which firms mooch off of Facebook’s
infrastructure without offering much in return. As an example of this tension, Facebook and
Twitter, firms once known for their openness, have begun to erect walls to make it more difficult
for users to integrate their services. Twitter users used to be able to click on an Instagram photo
and have it displayed directly in the Twitter app or in a pop-up window in Twitter-owned
TweetDeck, but doing so prevents Facebook from wrapping Instagram content in messages,
collecting “Likes,” and—although it doesn’t currently do so—running ads. Instagram also
blocked user ability to find friends on Twitter, while Facebook blocked Twitter users from
finding Facebook friends for the Twitter-owned video app, Vine. [32]
Finally, consider security. Allowing data streams that contain potentially private posts and
photographs to flow through the Internet and have them land where you want them raise all sorts
of concerns. What’s to say an errant line of code doesn’t provide a back door to your address
book or friends list, to your messaging account, or to photos you’d hoped to only share with
family? Security breaches can occur on any site, but once the data is allowed to flow freely,
every site with access is, for hackers, the equivalent of a potential door to open or window to
crawl through.
Facebook’s increasing dominance, long reach, and widening ambition have a lot of people
worried, including the creator of the World Wide Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently warned that
the Web may be endangered by Facebook’s colossal walled garden A closed network or single set
of services controlled by one dominant firm. A closed network or single set of services controlled
by one dominant firm. . [33] The fear is that if increasingly large parts of the Web reside inside a
single (and, for the most part, closed) service, innovation, competition, and exchange may suffer.
Summarize document 8.3 into 5 sections (500 words or more) labeled below. Answers this question (100 words or more):Is Facebook profitable? How much do you think Facebook is worth? Would you work for the firm? Invest in the firm? Issue the firm a line of credit or lend them money? Advertise through the firm? Why or why not?
- 8.3 Lessons from Facebook as an Apps Platform: Early Promise, Continued Challenges, Mobile Missteps
- Mobile is Tougher
- Messenger
- APIs
- Strategic Concerns for Platform Builders
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