More on the “gatekeepers”

This is EXACTLY what I am talking about:

Facebook Bankruptcy I can’t keep up with the friend requests, the requests to confirm how we know each other, the requests to tell you I like you, the requests to tell you I want your to tell me what movies you want to tell me about, etc. Frankly, I don’t understand why all of these startups are spending all their time trying to build inside of Facebook’s walled garden…. well, I guess I do understand it: they like the quick hit of watching the apps #s run up. However, it makes no sense to me to build inside of someone else’s platform when you have the wide open internet out there to develop on. I guess if you look at Facebook applications as free marketing maybe. Feels like everyone who is doing this is the Web 2.0 version of old IPs (information partners) at AOL in the pre-web days…. except there is no $4.95 an hour fee to split with Facebook! Time and the open internet has told us that model isn’t sustainable. Closed gives to open…. eventually.

It wasn’t the rest of the world that was clamoring for an open API–it was the tech guys. It wasn’t the users who were begging FB to tear down the walls and the regulations–it was the people who wanted to be users. In fact, not 6 months ago the main appeal of Facebook was its purposeful avoidance of the chaos of direct democracy. They made their bones as a niche service that value their season ticket holders over the fair weather fans. And now look….

Literally just weeks after THEIR demand was granted, THEY’VE had enough. Of course they’re calling it a failure now–it was pretty much a certainty. There is no accountability here. At least before you could say they were good at knowing what they wanted, but that’s not always true either. The fact of the matter is the tech crowd is abysmal at making predictions, selecting trends and knowing what people want. It’s time they stop being able to coast on past success. It’s just becoming comical at this point.