Back in January I predicted that the blogosphere would be the next MySpace. The amount of freedom and innovation in the “wild widget web” will be ultimately more compelling.
So it’s interesting to see Facebook release a powerful development platform for external developers. This is a very smart move for them, and a smart way to leverage their position as gatekeeper to their millions of users.
As Josh points out, this is tantamount to an extra $250 million R&D budget for Facebook. But Scott Heiferman warns of parallels to Prodigy and AOL.
This is a smarter move than what AOL and Prodigy did 10 years ago.