It takes more courage than I can imagine to put your golden egg on a pedestal for anyone to touch, study, steal.
Sucks for developers, sure, but at some point devs start to sound kind of greedy. In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market. At the very least, you should respect the risk these companies take.
[1] http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...
You've omitted a word or two.
I hate walled gardens. But I really don't think they are objectively the same tune different band. You're saying they will be spanking platform devs who's apps prove detrimental...well that's pretty different from Apple. Hugely different. Hmmm, hardly in the same class.
[edited to move part to a different parent comment]
In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?
Things get complicated with friends' data of course. Facebook has a collection of your friends phone numbers, and data access permissions and storage rights get complicated.
If I start saying an opinion like Facebook is better than X, then I think you're right.
A few weeks after we added this feature, Facebook told us if we kept doing this -- if we kept letting users import their own photos -- our API access would be terminated.
So, yeah, walled garden.
