This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful. I've seen th

This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful. I've seen this in mobile games over and over again - people who were successful in AAA games would start a company and raise a bunch of money and say "We're going to FIX mobile gaming!" And then they would fail spectacularly because their mental model of the problem didn't accurately reflect reality. Google has repeatedly blown chances to build social platforms because they seem to believe that every problem can be solved via scale. OpenSocial is another prime example: They built a platform, brought in social networks, were able to say that they had X many millions of users and thus had achieved massive success... but it was a terrible API that was difficult to work with and offered far less functionality than the Facebook platform it was meant to compete with. I'd love to see some commentary from someone who worked on that, but my impression was that they didn't understand that the FB platform's extreme ease of use and developer-friendliness was what made it work well, and that the platform's scale was a value-add on top of that.