By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.
Once more large internet companies realize that their users (both of their services and API) are not necessarily their customers (Think Twitter's denial of new 3rd party clients), the API free-for-all which we're experiencing right now will dry up, and we'll see at least one of the companies-who-are-built-on-other-companies fail. This might be the kick in the pants that the startup community needs to realize the importance of building unique, independent businesses.
Much better than your business relying on a single third Party (as in the featured article), where should you cease to have access you are completely screwed.
This sort of scenario might be easier to identify and invest in than "the next Facebook".
Creating an app as a "talent-acquisition play" seems reasonable but wouldn't you want to position yourself for multiple offers? If Facebook buying for talent, it doesn't have to restrict itself to the creators of Facebook apps.
Are all the people who have built successful companies that rely on facebook, apple, twitter, google, or other platforms wrong?
The important thing is to understand the risks and account for them. Don't overreact just because having your app suddenly pulled seems more traumatic or less under your control than other failure modes.
And a game of three-card-Monte involves risks(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte).
How do you distinguish the risks involved in one from the risks involved in the other? I'd say one important question is whether the "house" has more incentive to take your stuff or more incentive to benefit along with your success. Considering that Facebook's business model is essentially still up in the air, the question of what Facebook in particular cares most about is also up in the air.
Facebook, on the other hand, became successful without any of the additional third party applications that use it as a platform today. A "bare" Facebook, without any third party apps, retains quite a lot in the way of functionality. This means that Facebook's interests are much less aligned with yours than Microsoft's.
Yes, it means something. The question is what.
It might mean that Facebook has strong incentive to steal Zynga's business.
Considering there are rumblings that Zynga is casting about for other platforms, Zynga might think so.
If Facebook could be the home of many profitable apps that it had fair and transparent way of taking a cut from, then you could feel like Facebook was likely to keep its ecosystem working. Until then, it seems like anyone building on Facebook is subject to continuous risk of, as you imply, a sea-change in Facebook's operations.
huh? how do you figure that?