As Facebook’s F8 conference opens today, I’m reminded of the summer of 2007 when Zuck reported 24M monthly active users at the first F8 and unveiled a new platform for 3rd party developers to build on the “social graph.”
Like many others, I quit my job and convinced a few friends to join me as it was clear to us that there was no better place on the internet to acquire users. So HungryMachine was born, starting as a consulting shop building apps for other companies (JibJab, Animoto, ESPN, and more), we used that cash to fund our own products: Visual Bookshelf and the original LivingSocial — A suite of apps that collected your interests so that we could target personalized ads to every user.
As a tiny team of 5 engineers, we worked quickly and devoured any API the Facebook Platform team would launch. After leveraging a new feature in the summer of 2009, before anyone else, we grew by 40M users in 3 weeks, eventually reaching over 100M. To put that in perspective, FB only had 250M users at the time. Up to that point in internet history, it was not possible for small teams to easily reach millions of people.
Were there bad actors back then? Of course. But we tried not to be and believed it was possible to build fun engaging products that users and even Facebook loved.
Facebook liked one of our products so much they added it to the profile a year later. 🙂
I tell this story because I have deep respect for FB and the massive scale of their traffic firehouse, but as I’ve watched the platform progress over the past five years, they’ve become more and more closed, seemingly in the face of their core hacking ethos.
Facebook’s hacker culture created a magical ecosystem for the internet at large, opening opportunities for thousands of small teams to build companies and reach millions of consumers.
Today at F8 2016, FB will launch new platforms around Messenger, Oculus, and maybe more. The real question is how open will they be? Are there any hackers left at FB that believe openness and distribution drives progress? My fingers are crossed there are a few left and the hundreds of developers I see around me at Fort Mason today will have the opportunity to build compelling products on a platform that reaches over 1B people.
Ready. Set. Go.
