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I welcome your additional precision and those those are good points. However, I think that you should hold the word "never" to the same standard. I certainly

by wamatt 14y ago

I welcome your additional precision and those those are good points. However, I think that you should hold the word "never" to the same standard. I certainly used to preach the same view as you to anyone that would listen, but over the years I've seen many successes that violate the rule. Rationally speaking "never" does not make sense. One needs to evaluate (among many things) the risk of being shut down, how much benefit can be extracted before termination, and what the overall cost (money, opportunity cost etc) and benefit is etc. "Zynga's first game, Texas Hold'Em Poker, now known as Zynga Poker, was released on Facebook in July 2007." [1] Yes Zynga suffered immense hardships because of the Facebook reliance, but Pincus still built a billon dollar company which would not have happened if he'd taken your advice to heart in 2007. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga

neya 14y ago
I agree, but the core product here is the Game itself and not any of Facebook's functionality. Sharing was only an added benefit. If you recollect, the original game was hosted on Zynga's main website (where you could go directly and play if you wanted) and it was served via an iFrame on Facebook's app (this was before even Facebook came up with the app rules of having an iFrame). So, if Zynga, for example, had built a messaging service that was completely dependent on just Facebook's API, like the Start-up in question, I think they would never have seen the money they saw. I agree, 'never' was perhaps too strong, maybe I should have said '99% of the times'.
mbesto 14y ago
Let me settle this for you guys. "There is an inherent risk associated when developing on top of someone else's platform. It's your job as a business creator to identify that risk very early on and mitigate it as much as possible. It is impossible to eliminate. Blindly assuming it's not a risk, can easily lead to large stakeholder management problems down the line."

by wamatt 14y ago

neya 14y ago

I agree, but the core product here is the Game itself and not any of Facebook's functionality. Sharing was only an added benefit. If you recollect, the original game was hosted on Zynga's main website (where you could go directly and play if you wanted) and it was served via an iFrame on Facebook's app (this was before even Facebook came up with the app rules of having an iFrame). So, if Zynga, for example, had built a messaging service that was completely dependent on just Facebook's API, like the Start-up in question, I think they would never have seen the money they saw. I agree, 'never' was perhaps too strong, maybe I should have said '99% of the times'.

mbesto 14y ago

Let me settle this for you guys. "There is an inherent risk associated when developing on top of someone else's platform. It's your job as a business creator to identify that risk very early on and mitigate it as much as possible. It is impossible to eliminate. Blindly assuming it's not a risk, can easily lead to large stakeholder management problems down the line."