The web is now ‘the’ platform. Some apt comments from blogging time wasters.
If You Fight the Web, You Will Lose.
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely.
Faced with competition from this open web, AOL lost…running a closed service with custom content and interfaces was no match for the wild frontier of the web. Maybe if they’d done some things differently, they would have fared better, but they still would have lost. In competitive markets, open and messy trumps closed and controlled in the long run.
It’s not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it’s oversimplification to say that Facebook’s API is the new Blackbird, or the new Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water.
