[at-fates-hands]

“We’ve designed Facebook Platform so that applications from third-party developers are on a level playing field with applications built by Facebook"

I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".

[macspoofing]

>I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".

I don't blame people who would think that back in 2007. This was a new way to build and deploy applications. It could very well have worked out great (e.g. Amazon for example, has been largely successful in building an e-commerce platform for third party vendors that also compete with them. Not to mention competitors (e.g. Netflix) using AWS). Having said that, after developers were burned by Facebook, Twitter and Google, I don't think anyone should trust social-cloud platforms enough to base their entire business on them.

[samstave]

Amazon has a lot smarter people working for them on a far more complex product.

[fizzbar]

I think Zuckerberg was especially naive in this regard; I suspect he truly thought FB could successfully execute the "totally fair and open platform" strategy.

Reality did not agree.

[pfraze]

To be fair, other platforms had done so in the past: Windows, OSX, even iOS (though less so). I figure the problem was at least somewhat because you couldn't match Facebook's "native apps" with 3rd party-- it was a technically weak platform.

[return0]

Truth is , facebook itself did not actually compete with developers, Zynga did (they had a special contract with facebook for a few years)