[sarbogast]

I so needed this service. When I heard the news they were acquired by Facebook, I knew it would come to that. It's really a shame. Facebook is starting to worry me. If they start to buy and digest every innovative service out there, thus preventing others to innovate in the process, they start to look more and more like a black hole and it's scary.

[Dn_Ab]

I don't know. I think this will spur innovation that facebook couldn't possibly buy all of. People will be more likely to avoid building a core experience around a free service and instead either; innovate on their own and learn what is needed if it is really their dream or use an established open source platform if a sufficient solution exists. One downside to some open source projects is that they are meant to be flexible to a lot of use cases so you get a lot of subjective bloat with respect to your use case. But in the early stages, if the api is only a side show but main enabler to the key idea, it's still worth it to ignore the "bloat".

Our society/economy is currently not advanced enough to support free services nor are there many options to hide/divert costs sufficiently as not to matter. Eventually any free service must come to an end.