Just spotted this sad note from the developers of one of the few Facebook apps I’ve enjoyed using, Blog Friends. The app combines blog aggregation with social networking, and does a good job of highlighting interesting posts you might otherwise miss:
Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow …. the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.
What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.
We’re shutting down, as of today.
It’s tough to prosper without a sane business model; and it’s tough to survive on some third-party’s proprietary platform.
Proprietary platforms love developers (Ballmer’s battle cry, remember), because they add value. They are risky for developers though, because the platform owner can change the rules.
Is Bubble 2.0 going to end the same way as Bubble 1.0?
Events like this are a wake-up call to the likes of Chris Anderson’s ‘Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business’. If it really cost nothing to produce a Facebook application then this wouldn’t have happened. Trouble is, it does; in time and intellectual effort.
Programming is still to all intents a craft, not a manufacturing industry, and intellectual effort and personal time are now becoming the limiting factors.