Four Things Every Developer Should Know Before Building a Facebook Application

Four Lessons Learned From Developers Past

During his presentation at the Community Next conference, Mitchell Kapor drew upon his experience developing Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes in the late 1980’s to deliver four thoughts about developing applications on someone else’s platform.

• Platform owners have the power
• Innovations migrate into the platform
• Some platform owners want to control the whole system
• Platform owners need their applications, but they are destined to absorb the best of them into the platform

These four “basics” are alive and well on Facebook. While there is little that many developers can do to combat this, after all they are playing by someone else’s rules, developers would be wise to work diligently to build an off-line presence that leverages their applications and can survive regardless of what happens to the platform or the application itself.

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