For those of us who monitor social API development religiously, it was a particularly interesting several days. Facebook cut off Voxer from its find friends API last week, on Thursday they cut off access to Twitter’s video sharing app Vine and on Friday blocked Yandex’s new app Wander only 3 hours after launching! The find friends functionality is critical to app developers because it allows new users to import their social graph to make the app social from their first use. For many social apps, this is the difference between a ghost town and vibrant, engaging experiences. Without access to facebook’s robust social graph data it can be incredibly difficult to build a social experience.
The decision to cut off these rival, emerging services should send a clear message to developers building on the facebook platform: be careful about your reliance on facebook. But this really shouldn’t come as news to anyone; facebook has always had the ability to do this at its own discretion—it’s right there in their developer platform policy. As Justin Osofsky explained,
“For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today.”
If you read between the lines here, Justin is saying ‘if you want to capitalize on our valuable social data, you’d better be adding more value to the facebook ecosystem than you’re taking.’
This line of thinking has been in place for a while, it’s just that facebook has never so adamantly brought down the hammer (which is why it has garnered so much attention). But the truth is that if an app takes more value than it creates for facebook, it doesn’t really matter if it’s doing something explicitly against the terms of service because facebook “can change these Platform Policies at any time without prior notice as we (facebook) deem necessary.”
Really, facebook is doing what they must to survive the API wars. After all, twitter cut off instagram’s access to its find friends API after its acquisition. In a world where the value of data is increasing exponentially and rival social platforms are becoming more and more insular, app developers have to be increasingly thoughtful about how and why they develop on social platforms. ‘Am I creating as much value for them as I am taking?’ ought to be a requisite question for any developer building on facebook or twitter’s APIs. Also, developers should try to limit their reliance on any one platform; bridging data sets across these platforms
will be the best way forward.
With great knowledge (social data via APIs) comes great responsibility (a value creation mandate for the platform in question). Creating value for customers will always be priorities 1-3, but its looks more and more like creating value for your API providers will end up being priority 4, at least if you’re building on a social platform.