How Facebook is Pulling an Android... and Why
If you think Facebook's announcements of Single Sign-On, Places API and Deals Platform were a disappointment, you and I disagree, and I'll tell you why. Grab a few Red Bulls, blast some Ronald Jenkees, and turn off your phone - I can't be interrupted and I have some explaining to do.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at the end of a dense week for Facebook: on October 29 the company disclosed inadvertent User ID sharing by platform developers, and on November 2 it closed the asset purchase of Drop.io as an acquihire of its team. The November 3 mobile-focused event then produced the announcements Phandroid defends — Single Sign-On, the Places API, and a Deals platform attached to Places.
The 'pulling an Android' framing is the story's analytical core: confirmed reporting has Facebook explicitly compared to Android's open-platform approach, opening identity, location and commerce to third parties instead of shipping its own device. Pickup was broad and immediate — Facebook's own blog ('Making Mobile More Social'), Inside Facebook on the local deals service, Scobleizer's Zuckerberg interview, and The Social bluntly casting it as Facebook telling Foursquare 'you're out.'
First-order effects
- Developers gain Single Sign-On and the Places API, meaning third-party apps can bolt Facebook identity and check-ins onto their products instead of building their own authentication or location layers.
- Check-in startups — Foursquare above all, per contemporaneous commentary — see their core feature commoditized the moment Places becomes a free API any developer can call.
Second-order effects
- Location and deals competitors now have to answer a rival whose distribution runs through hundreds of millions of existing profiles, pushing them toward differentiation beyond check-ins themselves.
- The freshly acquired Drop.io team folds into this mobile push, an acquihire whose value depends on execution against the roadmap announced this week.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the contested layer of mobile shifts from the operating system to the identity-and-commerce layer on top of it — the same commoditization logic that let Android spread beneath handset makers, here applied by a social network across both major phone platforms.
- Opening the platform this wide also raises the governance stakes: the User ID leak disclosed on October 29 shows how third-party data flows through that layer become the regulatory exposure, not just the first-party app.
The trend: Mobile platforms are competing less on devices or operating systems than on who owns the identity, location and commerce layer distributed through everyone else's apps.