
Don't build soley on someone else's technology (witness Flock / Firefox) - mattculbreth
http://www.centernetworks.com/dont-build-solely-on-anothers-technology-re-flock
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mattculbreth
This is a good thing to note. You can run into problems when:

1\. You are using somebody else for infrastructure and that infrastructure
changes/goes away/is suddenly more expensive. Witness Amazon AWS (which we're
using), Google Maps, etc.

2\. Your benefactor suddenly decides to compete with you. That happened to a
company named Outlooksoft earlier last year when Microsoft decided to get into
the budgeting and planning business. Outlooksoft had based their product 100%
on a Microsoft infrastructure. They had to scramble to add support for other
databases and G/Ls.

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zaidf
That is why when we were planning iJigg it sounded really cool if we could
wrap it around Facebook and its API. Even though in short-term it would be
good, in long-term a) we'd be typecasted as a facebook feature and b) always
be at the peril of a large corporation. Doing it without dependance on other
corporations is tougher IMO but the only option if you don't want you business
to depend on facebook's press releases.

-Zaid

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joshwa
See also Alexa/Alexaholic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=7542>

