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> As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names. Now contrast Twitter's earnings per share wit
by jldugger 10y ago
> As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names.
Now contrast Twitter's earnings per share with Facebook's, which does have a real name policy. This policy is 1 percent about harassment, and 99 percent about building an advertising market to sustain the thing once built.
Same logic applies to the read-only APIs. Unless you know a way to embed ads into the APIs, apps like Tweetdeck directly reduce income. This is why Twitter tried to lock down and revoke API access.
If anyone has been making mistakes here, it's been Twitter, who is now in such a poor financial position that, despite laying off a huge number of engineers, their best hope of avoiding Google Reader's fate is to be acquired.
- bad_user 10y agoFacebook's revenue has nothing to do with their real names policy. Unless you use those real names to tie them to a bank account or some other database, their value is zero. And I don't think Facebook is doing it, or sharing those names with advertisers, because they have other much more valuable signals and ads platforms in general don't actually want to share their data with advertisers, because that's their secret sauce, preferring to do the targeting by themselves. I've worked on an advertising platform. This idea that those real names have value is basically a myth. And speaking of Twitter's API, trying to revoke access is one of those decisions that irrevocably hurt them. The big reason for why Facebook succeeded while Google+ miserably failed is that Facebook is a platform.