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This is a fairly bold and well-timed move by Facebook. Viewing the stream was the last "feature" that was controlled entirely by Facebook, and is one of the pr

This is a fairly bold and well-timed move by Facebook. Viewing the stream was the last "feature" that was controlled entirely by Facebook, and is one of the primary reasons people come back to visit facebook.com. With this move, Facebook moves away from being a website and towards being a pure infrastructure/platform play; they own the social graph and they are the platform for pushing information through it. I have always thought that Twitter wouldn't stand a chance if Facebook moved in this direction. Twitter has surprised everyone recently with their growth, but their survival is now hinged primarily on their great publicity rather than any fundamental strategic position. A lot of people still perceive them as a primary force in asymmetric 1-to-many communication, but in fact Facebook is taking this territory with public profiles and pages. Most Facebook pages have at least as many followers as their Twitter counterparts, and these pages can now publish into the stream the same way Twitter can. Now if only people would build useful stuff on the Facebook platform instead of a bunch of spammy crap.

ibsulon 17y ago
The problem I see is that most useful applications don't want to be tied to facebook.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  Absolutely. I'm trying to wrap my head around it but I can't.
- GraffitiTim 17y ago
  I'm assuming you mean tied in the "tied down" sense. On the one hand there are downsides and risks being tied to a platform, but on the other hand there are huge opportunities. For applications that are inherently social or have a strong social component, it's going to be very valuable or necessary to live on the social graph. Until now, those companies have had to try to build their own, which is very difficult or impossible. For now a lot of developers just see Facebook as a way to spread virally, which has led to a lot of annoying spam machines.

ibsulon 17y ago

The problem I see is that most useful applications don't want to be tied to facebook.

diN0bot 17y ago
Absolutely. I'm trying to wrap my head around it but I can't.
GraffitiTim 17y ago
I'm assuming you mean tied in the "tied down" sense. On the one hand there are downsides and risks being tied to a platform, but on the other hand there are huge opportunities. For applications that are inherently social or have a strong social component, it's going to be very valuable or necessary to live on the social graph. Until now, those companies have had to try to build their own, which is very difficult or impossible. For now a lot of developers just see Facebook as a way to spread virally, which has led to a lot of annoying spam machines.