Twitter, Apple, Facebook: The perils of building on someone else’s platform. | Hacker News Reader

Twitter, Apple, Facebook: The perils of building on someone else’s platform.

stevenwei.com

37 pointsstevenwei12 comments

Personally I'm of the opinion that it's a free market: Twitter, Apple, Adobe, etc, etc, are swearing allegiance not to the developers of third party apps for their product, but to the customer, which is how it should be. For instance, Apple's choice not to display Flash on the iPhone browser was not arbitrary and meant to hurt developers, it was focused on lowering CPU usage and maintaining battery life. Companies stay in business by understanding the needs of their customer, and if other developers/companies are casualties of that, well, hey, welcome to the free market.

I learned this firsthand when a Facebook app I developed was killed by Facebook eliminating the profile box: http://skitch.com/kadavy/bru5t/facebook-insights-through-a-f...

Funny how an hour after I post this, Twitter acquiring Tweetie is the top story on Hacker News. Good for them, too bad for the other iPhone Twitter clients that weren't chosen.

I think Steven's second point that the platforms can just build their own integrated versions should make people building trivial stuff that ends up popular shit themselves a little every morning while they scan techcrunch looking for their obituary.

URL shortening especially just amazes me... if twitter ordered some pizzas and stayed back late tonight they could kill that mini-industry.

The first thing any of these platform-dependent app companies should be doing is looking for a way to exist outside of the platform. To sit idly by and wait for the master to claim manifest destiny is just dumb. Unfortunately for the Twitter apps, it may be too late.

A. Build on one of these big sites and immediately gain potential audience of hundreds of millions of users. Risk the wrath of the big site.

B. Start from scratch. Spread by word of mouth. Try to get media coverage. Risk getting lost in the crowd.

I'd say there is a third option:

C. Start off building on top of one of those platforms to get a jumpstart on gaining audience. But plan your strategy so you aren't dependent on them, and have a stable future even if they disappear completely tomorrow.

Some services (like url shorteners or photo uploaders) that are entirely dependent on the platform to be useful probably can't work in that model. To them I would probably say: get big and hope to cash out before it's too late.

Lots of people have tried this. It's very hard, especially on Facebook, because people are there to spend time on Facebook first and foremost.

The one exception to this might be Zynga, but of course they're far and away the #1 app developer and I'm sure some non-trivial percentage of Facebook users come back to the site just to play Farmville.

Exactly. I don't know why more haven't been doing this. Ev must have been very persuasive about the ecosystem that everybody was building. Funny, the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man" just came to mind.

D. Modified C.

Build your own offering. Use platforms to reach customers, to spread the word, as service. Be ready to stop use any of them overnight.

Thank you. This phrases what I've been feeling for years (especially ever since the rush of Twitter based services). When you decide to make yourself dependent on someone else's product, and you don't get a formal partnership agreement from them, you are opening yourself up to disaster. And by no means should you expect the creator of that product to bend over backwards just to accommodate you. If you don't like their changes, or something they do interferes with your business, then leave. If you can't reasonably do that because you have inexorably linked your livelihood to that product, then that is no one's fault but your own.

similar to building a business based on SEO, isn't it?

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