Le Web: The Platform Roundtable

David Jacobs of Six Apart argued that treating developers well is important, because it allows you to get traction for your platform. But Ethan Beard of Facebook says that user experience has to come before developers. And developers will come up with problems before they come up with great things. Managing a platform is challenging, but it’s no use having happy developers and no users…

Is OpenSocial dead? Ning builds its apps on OpenSocial. Six Apart continues to integrate with it, but it lacks a killer app, suggests David Jacobs. MySpace using it – and it remains a useful way of building applications. People aren’t hearing about it because it’s just not controversial, suggests Jones.

So… what is a platform? A place to build applications? An identity service? A way of finding your friends?

There seems to be a debate about how much information should be carried off the originating sites using these platforms.