Nir, while I greatly admire your work and have read your book multiple times. This, here, sounds like after the fact reasoning.
The fact is recently Facebook had to dumb down its features and interface to make it more accessible for older people.
The time when everyones’ moms started to join Facebook was when they moved from “cool” Facebook (emphasis on Games and activity) to the current “scroll” Facebook. Nobody’s mom could ever use the “cool” Facebook as it had too much going on.
To make this transition Facebook has SERIOUSLY limited the usage of its API and de-emphasized “apps” over its platform. There really is no “platform” anymore. Hence, these app providers would naturally have a hard time.
None of the companies dependent on the FB API of the “cool” era have really turned out to be successful businesses since then. Let’s not be hard on Zynga.
Would the tweaks you mention really help Zynga when Facebook essentially leeched them while they were useful and hung them out to dry when it didn’t suit them (punindented)?
