Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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> There is no shortage of counter-examples, the most obvious being Zynga

And if you don't think Zynga is at risk from a change of policy by Facebook you're kidding yourself.

It's a gamble. A huge gamble. Zynga may in fact be large enough now to survive war with Facebook but they'd be savaged and greatly diminished by it (IMHO).

Look no further than the move to Facebook Credits [1] to see who really wields the power in this relationship. Facebook has exacted a 30% cut, forced on app developers (interestingly I haven't seen quite the same outrage at this as I have about iOS subscription changes).

[1]: http://www.allfacebook.com/zynga-facebook-credit-2010-09

Of course there's a risk, but that doesn't mean its a bad idea.

I would say a great deal of the companies in the world are somehow at the mercy of the fates, in a way similar to Zynga. A bus stop moves, and your convenience store no longer gets traffic for example. Lockheed Martin has one major customer - what would happen if the DoD arbitrarily changed the rules for them? Every tech company relies on Google and Twitter for marketing and traffic, what if they got caught it some algorithmic change and stopped getting search traffic?

And so what - there's risk everywhere, but there's opportunity too. At the risk of getting screwed, Zynga carved a $200m a year business. And now what? They get 30% less? A nice problem to have.

And now what? They get 30% less? A nice problem to have.

No, it's not. Ever.

I think you misunderstand the meaning of "A nice problem to have". It's like when you have so many users that things start to fall over. Basically that millions of people want to have the same problem you have.

Indeed, Zynga almost split from Facebook; they had the fortune of being equally valuable to Facebook and could, perhaps, exist on their own.

Twitter don't think of third-party apps as any benefit to them, whereas Zynga was a boon to Facebook.

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