Slide has already done plenty of horizontal on Facebook. Now it’s going more the way of vertical. Or at least more so than it has over the past few years.
Slide has for some time put itself forth as “better than the rest” in many respects. It’s chief competitor of seasons past, RockYou, has even publicly allowed that Max Levchin’s primary devotion offers extra layers of refinement, visual and/or technical, over its own devices. (RockYou however does peg Slide to be a sieve of its original ideas, a claim laid out in Sarah Lacy’s recently-published portrayal of the Web 2.0 space, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good,” a book which, despite its redundancies, is connects some dots in rather interesting ways.)
Vasanth Sridharan of Silicon Alley Insider questions the logic of this shift, asking whether Rabois’s view that “the great Facebook app landgrab ... is over” clashes with the idea of “unlimited real estate in cyberspace.” I would have to answer with a view fixed somewhere in the center. Yes, there is only so much world-is-flat development that can occur without building the marketplace to such an extent that much of what is created resides in relative obscurity. But there’s still a window open for new folk to build nifty stuff that could potentially do some competitive damage to Slide’s business. The market’s not full by any means. If anything, we’ll see laggards drop by the wayside and fresh faces join the march forward.
Yes, some redesigns at Facebook will make it tougher for some to get the fast-paced viral umph that Slide has been able to enjoy for north of a year now. But those changes could well affect the fortunes of Slide, too, despite its solid market presence. So, if new developers prove willing and able to build “awesomeness,” it’s all a wash.