An additional tragedy not mentioned is the broken circle of trust between developers, users, and service providers.
In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.
On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.
Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have. Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.
In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.
On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.
Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have. Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.