Apple declares war on Facebook, Microsoft buys another Social Network

A couple of interesting developments happened this week. Apple announced on WWDC that they are going to block third-party trackers, such as Facebook like buttons, and will only re-enable them after user clicks.

This reminds me of the "good old times" when Steve Jobs announced that they are going to kill Flash. If memory serves me right - soon after that we had to manually click on any instance of Flash Player on the page to actually activate it. - I wonder if Apple of today has enough social power to kill Like buttons like they killed Flash.

On the other hand - Microsoft announced it plans to acquire GitHub. Officially GitHub is a development platform, but I always thought of it as a social network, or a Guild if you like - the social network for people in the specific industry. I find it interesting that Microsoft now has LinkedIn and GitHub.

While Facebook and Twitter might be much more popular social networks - LinkedIn and GitHub seem to have more actions. LinkedIn has recommendations, endorsement and work history, while GitHub actually has "time commitment". Both LinkedIn and GitHub give me a vibe of quality over quantity when compared to Facebook or Twitter. Is social new "secret" strategy?