Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

As I’ve written before, Facebook holds all the good cards in the game it’s playing with app developers for the platform. Valleywag has a great post up about their letter to application developers applying for Facebook grants - We Reserve the Right to Rip Off Your Idea

During this process, however, it has become clear that we will receive proposals which contain similar or even identical ideas. As a result, and in order to protect other developers and us from claims that we or anyone else copied material without the creator’s permission, unless we agree otherwise in writing, we can’t promise that any materials or information you submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that we or others might not develop similar or identical products or services. Accordingly, we ask that you not submit any materials or information you consider to be confidential or proprietary to this e-mail address.

This said, if you would like us to delete any materials you have just sent us, please send us an e-mail within 48 hours instructing us to do so with an email subject “DELETE”, and we will delete those materials without review by anyone here. If we do not receive instructions to delete your materials within 48 hours, we will rely on that fact as indicating that you wish us to review your materials, with the understanding that we accept no obligations (whether of confidentiality, payment or otherwise) with respect to any materials, information or ideas included in your submission.

Jason Calacanis sums it up best:

However, give Facebook two missed quarters as a public company and they might not have no choice but to squeeze every ounce of revenue out of Facebook. That squeeze might include competing with the current crop of Facebook developers. You know what you can do if they have to squeeze? Nothing….

…Building inside closed ecosystems is very, very dangerous…. be careful.

If you’re building a business, you need to control your own destiny as much as possible. There are enough risks already.

This isn’t new but I recently realized how cool this is. If you get an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, they display it on your home screen. In the past, you had to click on the invite to go to a page where you could act on it. Recently however, they started providing a “Take Action” link. If you click on this it overlays a small menu on the page where you can decide how to deal with the invitation.

This is simple but thoughtful - they are making life easier for the user and accepting fewer page views for the action of responding to an invitation. In the long run, a better user experience will translate to a better business. It’s nice to see a company doing this. All too often, user experience gets sacrificed for page view inflation. Don’t do this.