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by austenallred
4721 days ago
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It's worth noting that a lot of the apps that Facebook "killed off" (iLike, Social Reader, RockYou, Zynga games, etc.) really did detract from the user experience. Let's take Washington Post's Social Reader as a case study. You had to authorize the app in order to read the articles (that were often loaded with linkbait-y titles), and any time you did read (or click on) an article it automatically shared it with all of your Facebook friends. Zynga is another example; I'm sure I wasn't the only one constantly bombarded with invites to Whateverville. I had to unfriend some people to avoid them, because there was no way to turn them off. It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was, "You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends." Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets. Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself, but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place. |
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I remember when they opened it up so you could add 3rd party widgets to your profile, and that was dangerously close to myspace... just about as close as Facebook ever got. And I'm glad they didn't get any closer. The reason facebook took off against myspace was that the user experience was good and it was clean. Ruining that is just not something they could afford.
I think you really nailed it with this particular statement:
> Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm.