What Do You Need to Be a Platform?

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This is the same company that almost missed mobile, because it was playing around doing a whole bunch of other stuff. Instead of focusing on that shift to mobile, they were playing around trying to be a platform. An ad company is you harvest user attention so you can serve them ads. And in that light, this makes so much sense. It's really annoying because I've been complaining about Facebook doing dumb things because they wanted to be aplatform from literally like the first month of Shoshakari.

Ben and James discuss Facebook’s current crisis, and why almost everyone misunderstands what the company did wrong: the problem isn’t advertising, it was Facebook’s desire to be a platform.

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Links

James Allworth: What the F*** Was Facebook Thinking — Medium
Ben Thompson: The Facebook Brand — Stratechery
Ben Thompson: Tim Cook’s Unfair and Unrealistic Privacy Speech — Stratechery
Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue’ — The New York Times
Ben Thompson: Mobile Makes Facebook Just an App; That’s Good News — Stratechery
Nicholas Thompson: Mark Zuckerberg Talks to Wired About Facebook’s Privacy Problem — Wired
Ben Thompson: The Voters Decide — Stratechery