>No one who makes Flickr hacks thinks to themself, "Man, I wish my hack could run on Flickr's site itself." Well, it could be argued that someone who makes Fli

>No one who makes Flickr hacks thinks to themself, "Man, I wish my hack could run on Flickr's site itself." Well, it could be argued that someone who makes Flickr hacks will, from the beginning, only consider external hacks, because only those are possible... it's a different class of functionality to start with. I think a rebuttal is in Marc's definition of a platform: A "platform" is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate. In other words, just because we can't see the benefits, doesn't mean there aren't any (that's pretty scary reasoning to base a business decision on, though). This discussion of platforms reminded me of Steve Yegge's rant on software that's alive: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht... He only specifically mentions platforms in passing, but he's mostly talking about the same thing.