Reminder: Building Solely on Another Company Can Lead to Trouble

When I am asked about building on top of Twitter/Facebook/MySpace, my answer has always remained the same…build your product or service and then leverage all of the available tools. So many people are building products on top of all of the new social networks and social media tools without investigating what would happen if a small change in the terms or policies by the services change. I am working on more thoughts about this topic for later this week but wanted to just provide a simple reminder to think about as you build out your product or service.

I know it’s easy to build on top of Twitter or a quickie iPhone app, but do these “on top” services have staying power and real business potential? Before you say yes, now think about if Twitter or iPhone makes a change that alters the app’s ability to continue.

Jesse Stay from SocialToo has a good discussion going on FriendFeed about this topic. SocialToo provides complementary services to Twitter and Facebook. While the discussion isn’t exactly about building completely on top of Twitter, the thread is still worth reading. Apparently Twitter changed their policy regarding following behaviors which has impacted Jesse’s application. Jesse begins by noting, “WTF @ev and @biz! You could have responded to my e-mail I sent to you first. You just killed what was feeding my family”.

I’d like to point to another post I wrote back in 2007 regarding building on top of another company. I will end this post with the same words I ended the 2007 post with:

So here is my advice. Build your own app. Leverage other technology where it makes sense but don’t put all your eggs in someone else’s basket. And if you do, understand that your position can change in an instant.