

Pmarca: The three kinds of platform you meet on the Internet - alex_c
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-three-kinds.html

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colortone
I thought this was absolutely brilliant.

There's a great discussion of it brewing at <http://avc.blogs.com>

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natrius
_"On the other hand, if you kill a Level 3 platform, you destroy the whole
reason people use your system to begin with -- to develop and run custom
code."_

That's only true for Ning and Amazon's web services, not the other examples he
gave. The whole point of Ning is to have custom social networks, so if you
took the "custom" part away, then yeah, people would stop using it. Amazon's
web services are just platforms, so if you took them away... they wouldn't
have a product anymore.

For products that aren't solely platforms, you can take away the platform and
still have something people want to use, even if it's a Level 3 platform. All
it would take for Facebook's platform to qualify is for them to run third
party code on their servers. Even with that, they could decide that the whole
platform thing was a bad idea, and you'd still have a useful site. I haven't
used Salesforce, but I'm assuming they had plenty of core functionality before
they opened up their platform, and that would still be usable. Second Life
could just hire a lot of people to build neat stuff for their world and close
off the platform to outsiders. As long as your entire product isn't a
platform, you don't have to support the platform forever. People might hate
you for getting rid of it, but it's still doable.

 _"I believe that in the long run, all credible large-scale Internet companies
will provide Level 3 platforms. Those that don't won't be competitive with
those that do, because those that do will give their users the ability to so
easily customize and program as to unleash supernovas of creativity."_

If by that he means that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and what remains of AOL will
have products that offer a Level 3 platform, then sure, that sounds
reasonable. But there are plenty of things on the internet that don't benefit
from letting people add random new functionality within the product itself.

Take Flickr, for instance. Lots of people use their Level 1 platform to make
nifty things. Most Flickr hacks integrate Flickr with some other product or
show nifty visualizations with Flickr photos. How would letting people do that
on Flickr itself benefit anyone? The data is all that matters in this case. No
one who makes Flickr hacks thinks to themself, "Man, I wish my hack could run
on Flickr's site itself."

It seems to me that Level 2 and 3 platforms are only really useful in games,
where they're nifty but not really a new thing, and two other places: portal
pages and social networks. In terms of what makes a Level 2 or 3 platform,
social networks are basically glorified portal pages to begin with. They give
you a box, and you stick your content in it while perhaps using the site's
Level 1 platform to make your content more useful and interesting. If you're
not a social network or a portal, you don't have boxes for third party
developers to stick things in.

I may be setting myself up for a "640k should be enough for anyone" moment,
but I really don't see it.

~~~
alex_c
>No one who makes Flickr hacks thinks to themself, "Man, I wish my hack could
run on Flickr's site itself."

Well, it could be argued that someone who makes Flickr hacks will, from the
beginning, only consider external hacks, because only those are possible...
it's a different class of functionality to start with.

I think a rebuttal is in Marc's definition of a platform:

A "platform" is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by
outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and
niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly
contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

In other words, just because we can't see the benefits, doesn't mean there
aren't any (that's pretty scary reasoning to base a business decision on,
though).

This discussion of platforms reminded me of Steve Yegge's rant on software
that's alive: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-
problem.ht...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html)
He only specifically mentions platforms in passing, but he's mostly talking
about the same thing.

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Goladus
By his definition, it sounds like Viaweb was a level 3 platform.

