Slide Says It's Done Releasing New Facebook Apps
Slide, the company that makes Facebook's most popular apps, says it's done making new ones for the social network. Keith Rabois, VP of strategy and business development, told us this week that the company wants to concentrate on making …
Context & Ripple Effects
Slide built Facebook's most popular apps, but by late 2007 it had already lost its lead when RockYou! overtook it in the race for Facebook app dominance. Weeks before this announcement, coverage of the problems with Facebook's platform captured growing developer frustration with the network's economics. Slide's decision to stop making new Facebook apps is therefore less a surprise than a milestone: the biggest beneficiary of the platform is the first major player to walk away from expanding on it.
First-order effects
- Slide redirects its product and engineering resources away from new Facebook development toward its own offerings, freezing its pipeline on the platform where it holds top apps.
- Facebook loses its highest-profile third-party developer's forward commitment, a visible vote of no confidence from the company that proved the platform could produce hit apps.
Second-order effects
- Other large Facebook app developers face pressure to justify their own platform concentration, accelerating a shift toward multi-platform distribution (MySpace, OpenSocial-era networks) and standalone destinations.
- Facebook must respond with better developer monetization and distribution tools if it wants to keep the app ecosystem that differentiated it from rival social networks.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows the structural lesson that dependence on a single platform's rules and economics is fragile for third-party developers — a pattern that recurs across every subsequent platform wave.
- It also points toward platforms internalizing what worked: years later, Facebook itself pursued a buy-build-and-partner strategy of standalone apps rather than relying on outside developers to extend the experience.
The trend: This is an early data point in the long arc of platform-dependence risk, where even flagship third-party developers diversify off dominant networks and platforms respond by absorbing key functions in-house.