
LinkedIn to Open Platform in Response to Facebook - pg
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/24/linkedin-to-open-platform-in-response-to-facebook/
======
staunch
I think this is where the non-hacker founder can get completely trounced by a
hacker-founder.

As smart as the guy is, Reid Hoffman has dragged his feet on letting people
insert third party applications even since MySpace widgets started exploding.
I don't think he really gets the leverage these platforms give a programmer,
because he's not one.

Hoffman was also an investor and on the board of Friendster. Another company
that totally missed the boat on becoming a social platform.

Now perhaps he finally is starting to get it. Too bad he's not a hacker and is
therefore at the mercy of his development team, which is going to need 9
months to release anything.

~~~
willarson
This isn't really a hacker/non-hacker issue, its just an issue of having
vision, and having good people with good ideas. A company that relies solely
on its founder for innovation is not a healthy company.

I don't have much love for third party widgets. Their inclusion on Facebook
has cluttered up the service. For people who are using websites as tools to
accomplish tasks, I don't see 3rd party widgets as a compelling feature. Like
Facebook, LinkedIn is also a social network, but it differs as it is
fundamentally a tool rather than a toy.

So far widgets have been toys, some of them excellent toys, but toys none the
less. Its a hell of a genie's bottle to open up in exchange for apps like
TopFriends, iLike, and the option to draw a mustache on your friend's profile
picture. I realize that the creation of tool-widgets is possible, but I am
still waiting to see if the effort of developing a public API is worth the
return in tool functionality (LinkedIn will probably survive without the
inclusion of TopConnections, and ConnectionsIdTotallySleepWith apps ;).

To address a few other points, Friendster failed to get on the boat because it
had immense technical problems leading to its stability/usability plummeting
like Wall Street trader jumping out of a window on black Friday. They probably
would have also missed the boat on developing an API, but this is what happens
at poorly lead companies: they fail catastrophically. My last thought is that
after a company becomes sufficiently large, having a hacker leader who wants
to build the public API by himself may be less of an asset than a disaster.
Facebook released their API quickly, and they released it incomplete and with
shoddy support and documentation. They've happened to get a blankcheck for
good publicity... but others may not be so fortunate.

