Published via FTLG: 2012-08-03 13:57:02
"Dear Mark Zuckerberg," began the letter App.net founder Dalton Caldwell posted late Wednesday in his blog. "On June 13, 2012, at 4:30 p.m., I attended a meeting at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, California."
Caldwell went into that meeting expecting to demo a new app he was building on Facebook's platform, which encourages outside developers to tap into Facebook's infrastructure.
That's not how things went down, he says.||"The meeting took an odd turn when the individuals in the room explained that the product I was building was competitive with your recently-announced Facebook App Center product," Caldwell wrote in his blog.
"Your executives explained to me that they would hate to have to compete with the 'interesting product' I had built, and that since I am a 'nice guy with a good reputation' that they wanted to acquire my company to help build App Center."
My Two Cents
More from Dalton Caldwell's perspective on his fight with Facebook. Update from yesterday – Marc Andreessen, who is a FB Board Member and Board Member for Dalton's company, Mixed Media Labs, stepped off. While I agree and applaud Dalton's stand on this, this fight goes part and parcel with playing on top of other people's platforms. It's FB's mountain, the rest of us just play on it.
The real question is how "nice" does FB have to play? How does Mixed Media Labs / Dalton Caldwell want to respond? What are his goals? Is he looking to drive an ROI for his investors? Is this about influencing the vision of the future? If it's money, then Dalton's decision-making is pretty easy. If it's about the future vision, then he has a long hard path in front of him. Part of me says FB's candor is doing Dalton a huge favor. All entrepreneurs should be grateful that Dalton is taking these arrows now b/c at least it puts this issue out in the open.
