Gates praised Zuckerberg’s drive, but described him as “more of a product manager”, insisting that he was more of a coder starting with architecture where Zuckerberg “starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.”
When Facebook introduced its plan to be a platform for developers to work on, I loved the idea. It reminded me of Yegge's post on Amazon, and seemed to me like a great way for Facebook to evolve to be the 'social layer' of the web.
Of course, they torpedoed that whole effort and kept going with their walled-garden facebook-as-a-product approach.
And now that Facebook seems to lose some momentum/popularity (or is perceived to be, which is still bad), they end up implementing part of the 'platform model' anyways, except still within their walled-garden with facebook-made apps.
It's quite possible that I'm missing the real reason why they are taking this approach, but seeing Zuckerberg as a product-first guy might be a partial explanation.
In fact, what with the need to develop apps that pull from the same source as the website, they probably had to focus more on the (private) API anyways.
Or was it more a matter of development priorities?
In the early wave of Facebook apps there was a lot of stuff built that users hated. In 2010, when my cofounder and I started doing user tests of some Facebook app ideas, it turned out that people were very averse to using new apps. If you use a regular app and it sucks, you remove it. But if you used a Facebook app and it does something bad, you look like an idiot in front of all your friends. It was a classic tragedy of the commons: the viral behaviors that made early apps successful rapidly depleted the goodwill of users. And people didn't blame the obscure companies doing the BS; they blamed Facebook.
The lesson we took from our user studies was to build something that was an external website, and only mention Facebook integration once we'd had a chance to get them more comfortable with us. And I'm sure the lesson Facebook took was "don't let other people ruin our brand".
seven hells...
However, it still doesn't really make sense to me. First of all, why not just remove the abuse, or implement more app-store like curation to ban abusers. And second, they didn't really seem to be too committed from the start, what with the constant API changes that broke stuff left and right.