"Catering to the need for intellectual stimulation is a little nebulous, but obvious at the same time. Designing the APIs in a particularly elegant way will naturally help bring in the best and the brightest engineers; throwing together something that barely does the job will inevitably turn off the elite. One subtler example: creating "simple" and "power developer" APIs will help the newcomer developers get up to speed very quickly, but not rob the advanced ones of the full power of the platform.

It's worth pointing out that ultimately, until non-advertising business models are devised for social applications (and probably even after they are) valuable distribution (reach + frequency) is going to be the main underlying goal for all developers, commercial and otherwise. The examples above simply illustrate what the platform can do to refine the definition of "valuable distribution" for the developers."

--Max Levchin, Slide, writing about motivating developers in social media applications, aka "games."