Talk about a picture being worth 1000 words -- I read the article and thought "sure, it makes sense, that's probably a problem" and then saw the traffic graph. Wow.
Everybody knows that this is a risk of developing inside someone else's walled garden. I wonder if there will ever be a way to implicitly or explicitly calculate the risk of something like this happening with any given platform. As someone who might develop for a platform, I can't see myself signing up for one where that's likely to happen, and that's one major thing that has kept me from developing iPhone apps.
To be fair, that traffic graph is pretty misleading. It looks like it's dropping many orders of magnitude, but really the drop is from around 850 to 400. It looks more extreme than it really is because the limits of the Y axis are from 990 to 320.
Fiddling with the range of a graph when people will assume it's 0 to something is pretty dodgy. Not to mention there's no key on it to say what the numbers stand for.
Sure, I don't mean to say anyone's being malicious here, I'm just saying, it's a shame to look at that graph and think "Oh wow what a big deal this is!" when really you're being shocked by the choice of y axis range.
it may be a walled garden of sorts, but unlike apple, facebook does not prevent the developers from introducing apps that compete with the garden's in-house functionality. They let the users decide instead what's best for the users.
Everybody knows that this is a risk of developing inside someone else's walled garden. I wonder if there will ever be a way to implicitly or explicitly calculate the risk of something like this happening with any given platform. As someone who might develop for a platform, I can't see myself signing up for one where that's likely to happen, and that's one major thing that has kept me from developing iPhone apps.