Hypebusting: Facebook has 'thrown the entire startup world for a loop'
FROM A FACEBOOK PLATFORM DEVELOPER — I work for a startup in the Valley and have nothing natural against Facebook at all - in fact my team and I have spent every hour of every day for the past four weeks developing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after CNET catalogued Facebook's app feeding frenzy, the story has shifted from novelty to disruption: a developer building on the platform writes that Facebook has 'thrown the entire startup world for a loop,' describing a Valley team that has spent four straight weeks redirecting its engineering toward Facebook apps. The piece travelled unusually far the same day — picked up by GigaOM, Fred Wilson's A VC, kottke.org, and Marc Andreessen's blog — so the developer backlash itself became part of the story.
The reaction splits along a telling line. Kottke frames Facebook as 'the new AOL,' a walled garden that owns the distribution channel, while other commentary argues the phenomenon should be read as an enterprise play rather than a consumer fad, with Facebook's growth already seen as an incursion into LinkedIn's professional-networking turf. Both readings rest on the same confirmed sequence: Facebook opened its API to third-party developers in mid-June and followed with the F8 platform, handing startups reach they do not control.
First-order effects
- Startups building on the platform are pulling engineers off their own roadmaps to chase Facebook distribution, accepting that the rules of their new customer-acquisition channel are set unilaterally by Facebook.
- LinkedIn is directly implicated: with Facebook's growth being read as a push into professional networking, its differentiation against a fast-growing general-purpose network narrows.
Second-order effects
- Investors following the same-day commentary (A VC among the pickups) face the question of whether a Facebook app is a company or a feature — the answer determines where early-stage money flows next.
- Rival social networks come under pressure to open their own developer APIs quickly or concede the third-party application land-grab to Facebook by default.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, distribution on the consumer web concentrates in a handful of platforms whose API decisions can redirect thousands of dependent startups at once — precisely the gatekeeper dynamic behind kottke's 'new AOL' comparison.
- The visible developer frustration marks an early stress test of platform-dependence as a business model: whether renting reach from a single gatekeeper compounds into durable companies or a treadmill of rebuilding to each rule change.
The trend: The consumer web is reorganizing around walled-garden platforms, where one company's API and platform moves can reset the priorities of the entire startup ecosystem overnight.