Facebook moving the application "profile boxes" off the main profile page was really the turn-key event where it clicked that things were headed downhill. They did it because people were getting fed up with app spam, but it also demonstrated that they had zero regard for existing Platform apps that had built infrastructure around a given set of assumptions.
At that time, companies like Zynga were still in their infancy and had plenty of success runway to go, but it really marked the inflection point.
As an app dev, I saw the writing on the wall years ago... at the time of that post it looks like I had about 550k users. Ended up selling all my apps six months later at ~1.3m, chalk one up for foresight == hindsight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82706
Facebook moving the application "profile boxes" off the main profile page was really the turn-key event where it clicked that things were headed downhill. They did it because people were getting fed up with app spam, but it also demonstrated that they had zero regard for existing Platform apps that had built infrastructure around a given set of assumptions.
At that time, companies like Zynga were still in their infancy and had plenty of success runway to go, but it really marked the inflection point.
As an app dev, I saw the writing on the wall years ago... at the time of that post it looks like I had about 550k users. Ended up selling all my apps six months later at ~1.3m, chalk one up for foresight == hindsight.