Facebook's 'Move Fast, Break Things' Era Is Over

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now preaching stability for Facebook’s platform, as the massive land grab for developers accelerates.

BuzzFeed/Matthew Lynley

In its earliest days, Facebook was able to outmaneuver larger companies like MySpace or Google by pushing updates quickly and tolerating a few bugs along the way.

Now Facebook is a large, publicly-traded company worth more than $100 billion and that isn't going to work any more — and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows it. So, at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco, he's preaching stability in an effort to attract developers that will build applications using Facebook.

"Move fast with stable infra might not have the same ring to it, it might not be as catchy," Zuckerberg said. "But it helps us build better experiences."

In terms of the nitty-gritty details, Facebook said it's going to ensure that the functions developers use, like logging in with Facebook, will be stable for at least two years. In industry parlance, this is called "API versioning," and it's a big change from the company's traditional strategy which often saw developers complain that Facebook would "break" their apps when they update their APIs.

Facebook also said it would fix any bugs within 48 hours of new code being released to developers. In essence, Facebook's "move fast, break things" era seems to be over — for good reason, as the company now not only has to make its case to its billion-plus users, but also investors.

In the past, Facebook's case to developers has been that its user base is large enough for them to be tolerant of its rapid updates. But now Zuckerberg seems to be making the case that Facebook will be a "stable mobile bridge" across platforms like the iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and the Web.

One way it will do that is through Parse, a developer toolkit that Facebook acquired last year — beating out a number of other large tech companies in the process — that powers many of the behind-the-scenes functions of more than 260,000 apps.

The strategy shift makes sense for Facebook given that both Apple and Google have sought to attract as many developers to their platforms as possible — including even offering preferential placement for exclusive apps. Facebook's case seems to be that it transcends and links those platforms, a separate kind of value proposition to individual platforms.

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