

Twitter, Apple, Facebook: The perils of building on someone else’s platform. - stevenwei
http://www.stevenwei.com/2010/04/09/twitter-apple-facebook-the-perils-of-building-on-top-of-someone-elses-platform/

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cmeranda
Personally I'm of the opinion that it's a free market: Twitter, Apple, Adobe,
etc, etc, are swearing allegiance not to the developers of third party apps
for their product, but to the customer, which is how it should be. For
instance, Apple's choice not to display Flash on the iPhone browser was not
arbitrary and meant to hurt developers, it was focused on lowering CPU usage
and maintaining battery life. Companies stay in business by understanding the
needs of their customer, and if other developers/companies are casualties of
that, well, hey, welcome to the free market.

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kadavy
I learned this firsthand when a Facebook app I developed was killed by
Facebook eliminating the profile box:
[http://skitch.com/kadavy/bru5t/facebook-insights-through-
a-f...](http://skitch.com/kadavy/bru5t/facebook-insights-through-a-friend)

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stevenwei
Funny how an hour after I post this, Twitter acquiring Tweetie is the top
story on Hacker News. Good for them, too bad for the other iPhone Twitter
clients that weren't chosen.

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benologist
I think Steven's second point that the platforms can just build their own
integrated versions should make people building trivial stuff that ends up
popular shit themselves a little every morning while they scan techcrunch
looking for their obituary.

URL shortening especially just amazes me... if twitter ordered some pizzas and
stayed back late tonight they could kill that mini-industry.

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ryanhuff
The first thing any of these platform-dependent app companies should be doing
is looking for a way to exist outside of the platform. To sit idly by and wait
for the master to claim manifest destiny is just dumb. Unfortunately for the
Twitter apps, it may be too late.

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chime
A. Build on one of these big sites and immediately gain potential audience of
hundreds of millions of users. Risk the wrath of the big site.

B. Start from scratch. Spread by word of mouth. Try to get media coverage.
Risk getting lost in the crowd.

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stevenwei
I'd say there is a third option:

C. Start off building on top of one of those platforms to get a jumpstart on
gaining audience. But plan your strategy so you aren't dependent on them, and
have a stable future even if they disappear completely tomorrow.

Some services (like url shorteners or photo uploaders) that are entirely
dependent on the platform to be useful probably can't work in that model. To
them I would probably say: get big and hope to cash out before it's too late.

~~~
jfarmer
Lots of people have tried this. It's very hard, especially on Facebook,
because people are there to spend time on Facebook first and foremost.

The one exception to this might be Zynga, but of course they're far and away
the #1 app developer and I'm sure some non-trivial percentage of Facebook
users come back to the site just to play Farmville.

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swernli
Thank you. This phrases what I've been feeling for years (especially ever
since the rush of Twitter based services). When you decide to make yourself
dependent on someone else's product, and you don't get a formal partnership
agreement from them, you are opening yourself up to disaster. And by no means
should you expect the creator of that product to bend over backwards just to
accommodate you. If you don't like their changes, or something they do
interferes with your business, then leave. If you can't reasonably do that
because you have inexorably linked your livelihood to that product, then that
is no one's fault but your own.

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dotcoma
similar to building a business based on SEO, isn't it?

