David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And this gets into the question of what is a platform, because let’s say I make a web app that I run on my own website, I do my own marketing, I do my own monetization, but I let users authenticate Facebook so I can pull some information out of their profile. It’s like it’s not really built on the Facebook platform. It’s not like the core APIs that enable my application to run are using Facebook’s APIs. I’m using Facebook’s APIs to grab some data. The core API set that allows it to run is the browser. It’s almost like if you think about the intermediation layers, Facebook was trying to build a platform on top of a browser that was a platform on top of an operating system that was a platform. The reason why we aren’t all using rich Facebook apps all the time today and think of it as the default platform, it was just too many layers of abstraction away from the hardware to win. I think that is totally right. But for the moment, thousands and thousands of both indie devs and venture backed companies flock to the platform. But what this does tease out is Facebook, and now we can talk about this 15+ years later, has a weak position for launching a platform since they don’t control the OS or the hardware. They have to make a little bit more of an appealing sale to a developer. That includes big distribution for you, but it also includes a ton of access to data. I remember being an early Facebook developer. After a user authenticates, looking at that JSON and being like, okay, so it’s their whole profile. Oh it’s their whole friends list. Wow, I get a lot of stuff here. Facebook was incentivized to do that because they almost had to sell harder than other platforms who controlled hardware historically would’ve had to.…

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