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And that may be perfectly fine right now. But if they change their TOS tomorrow that says you're not allowed to do that and shut you down because of it you're g
by ascendantlogic 11y ago
And that may be perfectly fine right now. But if they change their TOS tomorrow that says you're not allowed to do that and shut you down because of it you're good and fucked. They have all the users. They have the platform the users are on. Therefore they hold all the cards.
- blisse 11y agoI'm ignorant, but how does this differ for something like the Play Store where Google can just not let you publish your app on a whim?
- Jtsummers 11y agoThey're unlikely to do that. First, it's practically impossible to enforce a "don't use other messaging platforms" clause. I mean, they'll be pulling in a lot of companies early on that use SMS or similar to interface with customers already. Messenger is just going to be one part of those companies' communication arsenal. Second, if they did, you'd see lawsuits or major players leaving (for the same reason as #1, they're already on other platforms, they don't want to shut them down). A business needs to connect with as many customers as possible. If 80% of customers are on FB, and 70% are on Google, and 99.9% are on SMS, connecting to each of those platforms makes sense. But only one of them makes sense to use exclusively. Those are made up and wildly wrong numbers, but the real numbers will bear this concept out. FB won't have 100% of a business's chat-based customers, and unless they have > 90 or 95%, then exclusivity would be absurd.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoAs I said in my original comment, Twitter made a spectacular show of getting immense traction thanks to their universe of third party developers and then changing their TOS to effectively shut them down once they felt they didn't need them anymore. The situations aren't 100% the same (they never are), but my concerns aren't unfounded.