Facebook Platform Decline: Good or Bad?

There's a lot in the blogosphere the last few days about declines in Facebook developer activity. (Very impressive post BTW!) It sounds awfully inside baseball, but it's an important metric for the company to watch, and not only for the obvious reasons.

To play Devils Advocate here, what if the declines in activity are actually a healthy sign? It's possible.

Facebook's platform-- hailed as a genius move last May-- has had some significant snags. It needs to mature. Facebook needs to be harder on spammers. (I'm bullish on Slide and Max, but I gotta say the FunWall is one of the worst things on Facebook. Please fix it! Or just kill it. Unless it really is Max sending me porn messages everyday, it is hopelessly compromised. If it is Max, I may need to write a new chapter in my book....) And, more importantly, real, substantial applications need to emerge if the promise of the platform announcement is going to come to fruition. As many people have pointed out, they are mostly frivolous now.

I think this is all completely natural on something this new, and there's nothing inherently wrong with applications that are just for fun. But the sign that developer "flavor-of-the-month" enthusiasm for the Facebook platform is waning may be a good sign for the company. A sign that the companies still developing for FB will be more serious, start to build more substantial applications. And I have no doubt Facebook will keep tweaking the system to support that.

It's not that early adopters aren't great. They're just by definition not a mass market. No successful company stays the early adopter darling forever. It's just the natural high tech evolution. Robert Scoble might have had the most positive Facebook analysis of the day when he Twittered: "What's wrong with Facebook? Easy early adopters are abandoning it."