Facebook Connect was a radical evolution of Facebook’s API. It allowed third-party developers to use Facebook as the identity and login system for their sites and apps. For developers, there is often no greater challenge than getting users to sign up and invite their friends. Integrating Facebook Connect solved that problem. Why recreate your contact lists by hand when you could just sign in and let Facebook do it? Facebook Connect was easy for users, it was easy for developers, and it could have made Facebook as central to the app ecosystem as Google is to the Web.
To this day, Connect is the smartest business move Facebook has ever made. Over the years, though, it’s become the biggest opportunity Facebook has ever squandered.
Facebook failed to leverage Connect into de facto distribution across the Internet. It failed not because it underestimated the power of Connect or the upside of achieving platform ubiquity. It failed because it overplayed its hand in the short run: alienating developers and insisting on the primacy of the central Facebook over the distributed Facebook. It treated Connect like a value-add rather than an existential necessity. In doing so, Facebook risked selling short its own future.
via www.slate.com
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