International Law

20bits looks at the state of the Facebook platform ... and it's not exactly strong:

Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community.  Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.

But it's numbers that matter, not vague impressions, so does the data back me up? Is the Facebook developer community retreating from the public space of the forums? The answer is yes, on both accounts.

Looking at five key metrics we'll see that the activity level of the Facebook forums is a fraction of what it was at the beginning of 2008. The number of active users has declined 27% since January, for example.  And this is the best-performing metric discussed.

Furthermore, this decline in forum activity correlates to an overall decline in activity on the Facebook platform. Applications launched in early January were on average 1.5 times more successful than applications launched at the end of March.

The turning point occurred in early February where several interlocking factors came into play. First, Facebook finally saw real competition in the form of other social networking platforms, particularly Hi5.

Second, Facebook started instituting increasingly demanding and arbitrary rules on platform developers, which they then enforced selectively and for their own benefit.

Third, a trend of application consolidation began and accelerated through March, locking up developer resources inside private companies.

Read more here.