This should not surprise anyone. FB has a long history of pulling the rug out under its developers and advertisers in the name of maximizing their own profits. I cannot recommend strongly enough against building a business that is dependent on Facebook in any significant capacity.
I find it interesting to contrast FB with the early days of Microsoft--from a a developer perspective.
FB is routinely hostile to its developers* killing off APIs and screwing around with the system. Microsoft, however, went through extreme measures to ensure backwards compatibility of applications between OS upgrades.
I suppose the difference is that Microsoft needed developers to create its network effect and grow their DOs/Windows monopoly. FB however needs users, not developers, to create its network effect and grow their monopoly.
This begs the question, why can FB be so hostile to their own users? I suppose the answer must be because their users don't leave FB the ecosystem.
*Obviously I'm using the term developer loosely here. The article isn't so much about developers as it is about business' building on FB, not unlike business' that built on MS.
I think the best way is to replace individual services that Facebook provides with unbundled superior ones. For example the way WhatsApp succeeded was among other things by using the phone number as the unique identifier, that way especially signing up and starting to use the App was significantly easier than manually adding all your "Friends" again. Another example would be Instagram. Obviously Facebook realised the threat in both cases and bought them.
The underlying idea is that focussed "minimalistic" apps are easier to use than kitchen sinks like Facebook, especially on mobile devices. On top of that mobile phones already come with some sort of "social network" build in, everyone has the telephone number of people and businesses that matter to them. So the attempt of most big web companies to provide people with a "web identity" is mostly misguided in this case. With the advent of ipv6, hopefully it will be come pointless on the web as well. The remainder of todays "Social networks" will then probably be just a very well organised and feature full address book on your personal devices.
That's like a proof by induction but skipping the induction step; how to get the k'th user to leave? The alternative should be free, easy to use, 100% control to start, imo.
