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Personally I think I heard the phrase "don't be dependent on other companies' platforms" enough times to feel it in my bones. Some people obviously didn't.

On the other hand, that's morally draining - particularly when one works on something that's open source.

This HN submission suggests that's exactly what is happening: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681844

As with all easy answers, it ain't necessarily that simple. What if you have a startup that's based on the Twitter API? Where do you go? Plurk? Facebook has its own API issues, of course.

I think it is that simple. You don't build your startup solely on a free service that someone else has complete control of.

You don't build your startup solely on a free service that someone else has complete control of.

Sound advice. When a lot of these startups were conceived, that wasn't as obvious as it seems now.

That's been obvious since well before Twitter was created.