“We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications,” Zuckerberg told me, saying it would be analogous to the platform that Microsoft Windows provides for developers. Outsiders can now develop Internet services on Facebook’s infrastructure, he explains, that will have full access to all its members. Just as it is when someone writes a program for Windows, programmers won’t need any permission from Facebook or any special business relationship with the company.

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Contrarian insight: The real money’s in the shovels, not the gold.

Legacy: The first publicist of the California Gold Rush bought every shovel in San Francisco before he ran through the street shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Cisco Systems has become a $32B company using a similar strategy, selling the routers and switches that form the backbone of the Internet

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