“We now have high confidence that they hacked the D.N.C. and the R.N.C., and conspicuously released no documents” from the Republican organization, one senior administration official said, referring to the Russians.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-h...
There've been a few nine-figure acquisitions of companies that help traditional colleges expand online, with John Wiley buying deltak.edu for $220mm, and Pearson buying EmbanetCompass for $650mm, both in 2012.
Except, with an RSS feed, you can be assured that you are receiving ALL of the content that is being published by the site you are following. With Facebook, you are at the mercy of a black-box algorithm that decides which posts you want to see. Those local breweries are going to have to pay FB in order for all of their followers to view any specific post.
As someone previously burned by this business model, let me be the first to tell you how right you are. I built a small business around their SOAP search API some seven years ago, and received a commercial license and increased API usage to bring my product to market.
After easily lining up enough customers to exceed my daily limit, I lobbied for higher usage and a method to share the revenue (they had no structure to charge for API calls back then). For years I tried to contact anyone I could within the organization, but there was no response. After an eternity, they simply shut it down with no notice.
You just never know how long they're going to enjoy experimenting with their APIs, and unless you have a backup plan, it's a deal breaker.