

On Platforms - twampss
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=640

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thwarted
"Still, it can be worth it because there are a few mitigating factors. For
one, their interest and yours are usually at least somewhat aligned.
Facebook’s success is in no small part due to their platform."

I'm not sure that I'd put Facebook and Twitter (the reason the original post
that Matt is responding to was written) in the same group when it comes to
figuring out which star to hitch your wagon to. I agree, you can be reasonably
confident of your assessment of Facebook's goals and success being aligned
with yours. Facebook is also large enough that any one developer or group of
developers are an extremely minor nuisance to them, in terms of the size of
their total user base and the kinds of things they need to deal with on a day
to day basis. As Facebook grows their user base, your app can grow. Twitter
has a history of user base growth that correlates with an increase in
performance problems (either downtime or seemingly arbitrary limits, aka bad
scalability); does Facebook? Twitter has a lot of users, but it's barely
comparable to the size of Facebook. With Facebook, you are also more dependent
on their platform, integrated extremely close to it. With Twitter, your app
runs on your own domain because twitter doesn't provide any significant kind
of UI integration -- because of this, twitter the platform is more at risk of
_losing_ users (as they visit other domains) because of your app. In order to
use Facebook apps, you have to be on Facebook. Additionally, most third-party
twitter apps are _extensions_ of twitter, that make up for lack of features or
otherwise serious deficiencies of twitter (this is especially the case because
twitter has a record of _removing_ features as their method of dealing with
scaling).

Facebook is much closer to being a company and service that provides
infrastructure, even though the actual things that you can build on that
infrastructure are relatively limited (due to things like their TOS and
privacy policy). Facebook seems to have a vested interest in ensuring that
your third-party service continues to work on their platform, because _your_
app potentially keeps people coming to the site. This is not necessarily the
case with twitter. You can't tell what twitter is going to change that limits
you and your project in terms of growth or success. Facebook seems to make
decisions in the context of what their users want (especially after beacon),
twitter seems to be shooting in the dark.

And everything I've said above about Facebook applies equally well to the
iPhone. Facebook and the iPhone become more popular when people create and use
third-party extensions. Third-party extensions seem to threaten twitter. And a
threatened entity is one that strikes with force, not one that nurtures.

Really the message is * be cautious when deciding which platforms to use *
don't try to do everything yourself, but don't be entirely dependent either *
Diversify, man can not surive on one platform alone; this also increases your
reach * Be aware of the non-technical influences on the platform's continued
success and existence

