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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has locked down their API as well, but they haven't been hurt by it. Even when users give permission to access their friends list, apps can only access their list of friends that are already users of the app. Since in most cases the number of friends already using the app will be 0, the Facebook API is arguably even less useful than Twitter's.

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wow that's interesting! I haven't used the FB api in a few years now (using it was how I bought my house). That totally sucks.

Yeah, they really messed things up. I guess Facebook has decided they don't need outside developers anymore.

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.

And replicate the most promising business models discovered.

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

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

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...

Maybe they decided to stop selling out their users to outside developers. I can't think of any good use for friends lists apart from spamming the users' friends.

Ok, I'll bite... :) How did you use the FB api to buy your house?

He probably built a viral thing during the initial land-grab and then sold it.

There were tons of people selling sheep-throwing apps and whatnot back then, and it wasn't uncommon to hear of deals in the hundred-thousand dollar range. Then FB killed the virality.

Pretty much every time Facebook releases a new feature, some lucky sod gets rich. See also: Socialcam, which failed to gain any real traction, but got early access to the feed API, and leveraged that into a pump-and-dump.

Socialcam's "success" came from Facebook's actions publishing API (which is also now locked down). Every time someone watched a video, they would publish that fact on the user's news feed with a link to the video. It's hard to not go viral when you are carpet bombing users' news feeds. They were smart and sold out for $60M before Facebook outlawed the only thing that they had going for them. Unsurprisingly, they are now closed [1].

[1] https://socialcam.com

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