I never really talked about what happened to Audio; however, in seeing that so many businesses and people seem hell-bent on integrating ever-further with Facebook, I figured I'd provide a cautionary tale.
At the time of my creation of Audio, it turned out that Facebook had already cut some sort of deal to help iLike -- thus, in some strange way completely unknown to me, I was operating outside of the "plan." While Dave Morin worked quietly and bravely to defend me against the moves of iLike and Facebook executives to shut down Audio, he eventually found himself as a casualty in a greater power play quietly orchestrated by Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg, in which he was demoted and replaced by Chamath Palihapitiya. Chamath had been previously known to me from my friends at Winamp as "the guy who fucked Winamp," (after Winamp had been sold to AOL) and seemed like a pretty lame dude. Turns out that he had cut a backroom deal with Sean Parker to enable easy exporting of social graphs from AOL/AIM into Facebook -- and in return, as soon as the Platform appeared to be successful, Dave Morin was ousted from his job and Chamath was hired with $90 million in Facebook stock.
As soon as Chamath took over from Morin, I immediately started to hear more and more about how the record labels were about to shut down Audio due to copyright demands. In fact, Chamath would call and email my business partner and I on a regular basis to tell us that the app was about to be shut down -- and every time he did, I would have to frantically stave him off, telling him about how we were cutting deals with the labels to bring them on board and get licenses. What I didn't realize at the time, however, is that it was this very assurance of label support that was actually screwing me over with Facebook, as Chamath was basically just trying to shut down Audio to help his friends at iLike. Once he got word that we were in the final stages of a major round of funding from Universal Music and two of the other big four labels, he immediately shut down the app and thus killed the whole business. The funny thing about the final phone call from Chamath was that he claimed that Universal Music's general counsel had sent him a notice saying they would sue Facebook if they didn't shut down Audio -- but when he called me, I was sitting in Jimmy Iovine's office; Jimmy personally called the GC of Universal who told him the entire story was complete bullshit.
(Many of Audio's old users wondered why I never updated the app or fixed many of their complaints -- now you know what I was dealing with!)
I remember having a call with Sean Parker, who I then considered to be a friend, explaining my problems with Audio before its collapse. "It will never work," he said to me. "You'll see what I mean." I would have never thought that Parker would have been pulling such crazy shit on me at the time, but hey -- you live and you learn.
If you are entrusting your life data to Facebook, or if you are depending on Facebook and its platform for your livelihood, beware. In the real Facebook world, there is no trust, and there is no friendship -- there is only money and power. Think really hard -- really, think -- before trusting Facebook or its employees with anything. Don't be a Facebook fool.
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