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by mark_l_watson·16y ago·view on hn ↗
The FB developer APIs do make a nice platform. I did a little work a year ago on a customer's Rails app to make it play nice with FB.

That said, I woud hate to base my business just on one platform that I did not control. It seems safer to develop useful web apps and/or game web apps that can integrate with FB, perhaps act as Wave components, and run on the developers own servers.

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True, but in Zynga's case their audience is going to be drawn pretty naturally to Facebook.

Even at "max diversification" of their platform, it seems unlikely to me that losing their Facebook platform wouldn't be a crippling blow to Zynga.

How many 15 year old girls are really going to want to go to a completely different site to play Farmville? 5%? 10%? Zynga's demographic primarily seems to be whatever the exact opposite of "hardcore power user" is.

Granted, depending on how draconian Facebook's take is, that 5% or 10% might be enough to make them more money, but that seems somewhat unlikely to me.