David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…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. It’s a super great point. Now also, the reality was at the time I think developers were getting plenty of value just out of the distribution, and that was coming from newsfeed. If a user starts using your Facebook app and then the activity that they’re doing on your app is getting published to the news feeds of all their friends… Oh yeah. You could build a whole Zynga on that interaction paradigm.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.