[discardorama]

It's always like that. A company that wants adoption will make things all "open" and "free", and let the developers do the hard work. Once the users are there, turn off the API (or severely restrict it) to keep the users in.

[WalterSear]

And replicate the most promising business models discovered.

Facebook is doing it right now with messenger chatbots and Amazon is doing it with Alexa.

[TorKlingberg]

Developers also abused the API to fill everyone’s feeds with game spam, so I can see why Facebook locked it down.

[downandout]

Ironically, because Facebook requires in-game payments to be processed through their payments platform (for which they take 30%), much of the feed spamming specifically for games is allowed. Take the case of Slotomania - a mobile app that just sold for $4.4 billion last week [1]. Unless you manually uncheck a box in the UI each and every time it is presented - and I'm not exaggerating here - this game will wind up publishing something to your news feed approximately once per minute while you are playing the game. They printed $4.4 billion out of thin air using nothing more than aggressive spamming techniques.

News feed spam that makes Facebook money is allowed. Spam that doesn't is not.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-30/shanghai-g...