Is facebook open? After admitting in their SEC filings that there are tens of millions of dummy accounts, this would not bode well for them. Aivars Lode Avantce
Dalton Caldwell Punches Facebook In The Nose
Dalton Caldwell is a noted developer and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He has startups imeem and picplz under his belt. He used to have big hopes and dreams for a Web 2.0 that had widely available services on top of which lots of startups can build things of value. He had these hopes and dreams when he started a company in early 2010 called App.net that helps app publishers promote and monitor their apps on social media and via dedicated Web sites. One of the places he built that service to work on is Facebook. That’s a logical move: 950 million users is a big country.
It’s just that Caldwell never really believed he would be allowed to succeed. Caldwell for the last two or three weeks has been blogging about what he sees as a Big Chill underway on the supposedly “open” social Web. His fears were confirmed in mid-June. In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg posted today, Caldwell recounts a meeting he had on June 13 with a bunch of senior Facebook execs to look at his app and service that was built on the Facebook Platform. He says the meeting “took an odd turn” when the Facebook execs told him his product was competitive with Facebook’s own App Center product, and they would hate to have to compete with his service. Dalton, he says they said, was “a nice guy with a good reputation,” and how about if he just agrees to let them buy his company so he could help them build App Center? Caldwell wasn’t interested in becoming another Facebook acqui-hire, seeing his product shut down or melded into the Facebook colossus. “I’d rather reboot my company than go down that route,” he writes.
The awkward moment Caldwell recounts is, he says, not an isolated incident. He’s heard of other examples of startups getting the message from Facebook’s M&A team that it’s better to fold up and join us than try to build a big business on Facebook’s platform. Caldwell is one of a growing chorus of developers becoming leery of “platform risk,” or betting a business model on the good graces of a service like Twitter or Facebook that can change its priorities and steamroll a developer or two here and there in the chase for elusive ad dollars. Microsoft left carcasses all over the playing field in the 1990s and 2000s doing this very same tactic.
Caldwell isnt saying Facebook is evil. It’s just a misalignment of interests all around. From his post:
Mark, I don’t believe that the humans working at Facebook or Twitter want to do the wrong thing. The problem is, employees at Facebook and Twitter are watching your stock price fall, and that is causing them to freak out. Your company, and Twitter, have demonstrably proven that they are willing to screw with users and 3rd-party developer ecosystems, all in the name of ad-revenue. Once you start down the slippery-slope of messing with developers and users, I don’t have any confidence you will stop.…. …. …. ….I don’t think you or your employees are bad people. I just think you constructed a business that has financial motivations that are not in-line with users & developers. Even if my project isn’t the mechanism that instigates this change, the change will happen.Mark, based on everything I know about you, I think you get all of this. It’s why you launched FB platform to begin with. Do remember how you used to always refer to Facebook as a “social utility”? That is an interesting term to use. I haven’t heard you use that terminology in a while. I can guess why.
Seeking Facebook comment now.
The “project” Caldwell refers to is his “new” version of App.net, which is a free social service with an API available to all at a reasonable price. It won’t be free nor will it be ad-supported. But it will be open. It’s a long shot to get way off the ground, but at least it’s an insurance policy against the future Caldwell dreads, in which Facebook and Twitter’s ad-driven interests continue to clash with those of its developers. Caldwell put the project on Kickstarter here atjoin.app.net. It’s already raised $118,000.
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