Hacker News Reader

Comment by c2 | Hacker News Reader

2010 was the year to invest in platforms. 2011 is the year to invest elsewhere. So long Facebook, Twitter, Apple - I no longer trust your platforms enough to put any significant resources into development.

It's time to end the walled garden resurgence and the best way to do that is on the ground floor.

View on HN

More like 2011 is a year of over-generalizations. Good luck trying to find anything you can trust anyway.

I didn't mean it to be a broad generalization. Each platform has it's own problems, this is just the latest in another reminder that each of these can shut your business down with the flick of a switch or if they catch wind of competition they don't feel is right for their particular walled garden.

I trust myself to deliver products my customers want and find useful. That's enough for me.

With all these platforms (iphone/facebook/twitter),I think the smartest guys are those who do not get much news coverage, make decent money silently without growing too big, and not being too small. When you exist because of benevolent dictator,don't think of pointing a 0.44 magnum and getting lucky if you are just going to get nuked!!!

"I think the smartest guys are those who do not get much news coverage, make decent money silently without growing too big, and not being too small"

no spread news about the site, lots of money, small userbase --- is this even possible??? if yes, please give an example of a working site.

I don't know about the year-by-year breakdown, but that's exactly how I feel currently.

The platforms I've built for are each in the process of betraying their developers. I've done well with them so far but it's absolutely time to build independent businesses.

Independent of what? Platforms, technology, customers? Don't kid yourself, there's always somebody who's your "boss".

Independent of a platform which can shut you down just because you are a competitor.

It's amazing that people seem surprised that such a path is even an option.

I suppose you could argue that Level3, the big DNS servers, or InterNIC, or even DHS can shut you down too, but that seems awfully different then Twitter shutting down twitter app competitors, Apple threatening to pull content (competing) apps if they don't get their 30%, and Facebook potentially forcing apps to use their credit system or go home.

I'm really hoping people realize that this walled garden approach is hurting them in the end, and as these platforms move the goal posts more and more for what is acceptable, you might find you have wasted a few years of your life chasing a ghost.

It's up to you which path you choose, but for me, today, I'm making the decision to abandon these platforms and go my own way.

If you have a business based on say, using Twitter's API, you are wholly dependent upon them.

They could cut off your access, destroying you overnight. They could become less popular themselves, decreasing the value of your business in a way you have no control over.

That's not at all like being dependent upon a host, a linux distribution, your customers, or yourself. In a business based on some corporations external API you have all the usual dependencies plus your source, a single point of failure who is in a position of power over you.

I'm not sure this generalization applies to the same degrees to Apple, Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter especially has a hard platform to monetize to begin with - tweets are about all it has and so can't let someone hijack them even a little bit.

Twitter seems like the best "citizen of the open Internet" here. Distantly followed by Facebook, then with Apple being a foe openness as far as I can see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com