I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph.

I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web.

Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.

And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.

It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?

Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.