Facebook is receiving a lot of criticism for its failure to generate much revenue from its mobile presence.
But Nicholas Carlson, deputy editor at Business Insider, points to another problem for the social networking giant: Its interests are diverging from its partners, to the detriment of the partners.
Zynga, for example, essentially built its business on the Facebook platform, he notes. But while the social games maker has nosedived on its own incompetence, the initial slide was caused by Facebook, Carlson argues.
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Zynga thrived through its expert use of Facebook’s News Feed and Notifications to attract new game players.
But about two years ago, Facebook restricted companies’ use of those two windows, because Facebook users complained of spam from Zynga.
“Zynga's downfall illustrates that most of all, what Facebook needs to do to achieve [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg's vision, is be a reliable, consistent partner,” Carlson says. “It's having a hard time doing that.”
To be sure, “This was probably a smart move on Facebook's part,” Carlson acknowledges. “It has consistently put users first, and now it has been rewarded with 1 billion users.”
So what’s the bottom line on this? Certainly it behooves Facebook to be a trusted partner for other companies.
But on the surface, at least, it would seem more important for Facebook to satisfy its users. After all, without happy users, corporate partners won’t be able to gain much from the site, regardless of Facebook’s policies.
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