The developer ecosystem served its purpose for FB. It accelerated their growth to the mass market. It is probably a net negative nowadays. They have an ad business not a platform business.
> The developer ecosystem served its purpose for FB
Maybe, maybe not.
Let's say tomorrow InstaFaceSpace launches and gets a bunch of hype. You know, it's got shiny fonts and your mom's not a user yet.
There's a migration, just as there was from Friendster->MySpace->Facebook. InstaFaceSpace is open for developers, giving them the tools they need to make and monetize applications on top of their platform. Stop me if you've heard this one before ...
Let's say this is embraced and there's some tangible migration. Apps are being built on InstaFaceSpace - cool apps, fun apps, secure and privacy-ensured apps.
Now Facebook realizes they need to have the platform they threw away and its ecosystem to retain users. Now what? Can they say "hey come back we've got all this new stuff and these hot new endpoints?" Developers won't go back.
It leaves Facebook vulnerable. Perhaps not as vulnerable as the PR nightmare they're going through, but there are scenarios where it comes close.
Were apps really the reason for the growth FB experienced in the past decade?
I'd argue it was the apps (and the publishers) that led to the decrease of organic posting in Facebook. Instead of seeing posts from your friends, now you see viral articles, and app-related statuses.
It was one of the reasons and an inflection point. I remember the rush of activity with the release of the platform. People were poking each other and sending game requests. These were all FB apps. It was one in of a string of hits by FB, creating a lot of goodwill. They quickly released FB to many languages, often crowdsourcing them.
They've fracked with their developers so many times already. What's one more time going to do? I think many developers remember what FB has done in the past. They've changed virality, forced the use of FB credits, limited access to newsfeed, released really broken APIs, etc...
