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As a developer who builds businesses based on Facebook’s Open Graph platform, I am seeing a disturbing trend. With one hand Facebook is encouraging entrepreneurs to create companies built on Facebook Apps. With the other hand Facebook is usurping the best ideas and creating its own products to compete with those same companies. When Facebook takes these ideas and integrates them into its own product offering, Facebook has advantages and access to core features that weren’t available to the original developers. Facebook isn’t playing nicely with the very developers that are helping to grow Facebook’s customer base.

Two prominent examples of this practice are Foursquare and Groupon. Foursquare is a location-based Facebook App that allows users to “check in” to businesses like restaurants and bars using mobile devices. Foursquare’s application became very successful, growing to over 6 million users worldwide in 2010. In late 2010, Facebook announced a competing product, Facebook Places. Just two months after launch, Facebook Places had over 30 million registered users.

Groupon is an innovative, localized deal-of-the-day website that had 35 million registered users as of late 2010. A significant portion of the Groupon business model is the ability to share these deals of the day over social networks like Facebook. Today, Facebook announced the limited launch of Facebook Deals, a product that competes directly with Groupon’s core offering.

What Facebook is saying to developers by these actions is that you can be successful by building businesses using our platform, but if you get too successful, we are going to take your ideas and compete with you. That doesn’t seem like a good message to send to developers. After all it is companies like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Foursquare that are showing to investors how Facebook can be a truly powerful marketing machine and not just toy for relationship statuses.

Just a few months ago Facebook raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs. The company has plenty of cash on hand. While it’s probably too late to purchase Groupon, who turned down $6 billion from Google, why not buy up budding businesses like Foursquare instead of competing with them? This would send a much better message to Facebook App developers. Small companies would be encouraged to continue innovating using the Facebook Open Graph platform instead of looking over their shoulder to see when Facebook was going to come along and squash their business.