Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

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