Facebook Apps Facing Delays and Uncertainties

NewsCloud writes "After reading about the Facebook platform launch, I spent the next week learning the API and building my application. Facebook's platform has been pretty successful despite complaints of poor documentation, instability and outcries over its application approval process. I've been waiting two weeks for my application to be approved for their directory and had my account disabled (temporarily) after I invited a large number of colleagues. While I'm impressed with the potential of the platform, the experience has made me more concerned about the lack of transparency in privately held social networks and the risks we take as developers when we invest time in a company's platform. Facebook's home page advertises itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you." My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility."

we are not having issues..

Not sure what is going on with you, but we are not having issues with our facebook app, actually one of our guys was invited to speak a facebook meetup here in the city.
It sounds like they had concerns about your app being used as a/by a spam-harvester to abuse their network, and frankly I would be also cautious.

OMG! Facebook apps not working?

How will I be able to SuperPoke my friends? Or give them little puppy dog icon gifts? Noooooooooo!!!!

Not just facebook

You said:

the lack of transparency in privately held social networks and the risks we take as developers when we invest time in a company's platform.

Isn't the situation just the same if you depend to any 3rd party technology (operating systems, languages, platforms, etc) where you don't have a control?

Re:Not just facebook

...and the simple fact his application hasn't been approved yet means there's no regulation?

Missing the point entirely

The author of the "article" doesn't seem to get "it" with regards to the platform.

Firstly, the documentation isn't fantastic, I agree, it's a relatively straight-forward REST api, and wouldn't you know it, the community of developers has been filling in the documentation gaps [facebook.com]

As for instability, it's been there for the most part, you have to understand that Facebook might lack of the 100% reliability you may think your own code has. Facebook developers aren't perfect, nor is it unusual for things to break when near 25 million active users a day pound on it (at the very least, tiny bugs, image caching collisions i'm looking at you, become big bugs. As a side note, that has to have been the most famous end-table on the planet before they fixed that bug).

Finally, I've seen the "outcries over its application approval process" and those are silly as well. A very tiny percent of users actually install the application from the directory. My applications have blown up because of making use of the viral tools provided by the platform, invites, news feed postings, etc. Applications like X-Me exploded to well over 100k users before it was even listed (congrats chips), the same went for Graffiti

No system, especially a third-party system you rely on as a developer is ever perfect, but it's barely been a month since the Facebook Platform, so crying foul is extremely premature. If your only concern is that there's no one regulating the utility, then you should go ask some of those Windows developers how much fun the Longhorn-Vista moving target of a platform has been. It's their API, their platform, their social network, they get to choose what goes on with their "utility."

I'm sure i'll be marked as a troll, but this just reads like the same gripes at the bottom of the barrel in the FB Developers discussion board for some time now.
Disclaimer: I was one of the F8 attendees, and have been developing for the platform for almost 2 months now

Re:Missing the point entirely

Has anybody actually taken a look at what these applications are doing to facebook in general? The nice thing about facebook, everybody had a simple looking page that was consistently the same. Since the applications have been coming out, everybody pages started looking like utter crap. Gone is the static page that was easy to read, and simple to load. With the ability to add all the apps, facebook is turning into myspace. We all know how giving the ability to do whatever to their space makes the server go nuts, pages are a pain in the ass to look at, not to mention what does to the server. facebook used to be nice. now it's starting to become more like myspace, which makes me cry.

Huh?

"My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility."" Regulating what? The handing out of api docs? The creation of the programs? I've seen a couple of the programs and i can't see any that cross any lines, and i think the API was specifically designed for that. I can't comment on the handing out and documenting of the API, but perhaps the writer should talk to some of the other programmers.

I'm stupid

I really am. It took me a lot of kicks in the head to realize what I was doing was stupid.

In term of failed platforms, I think I have a long list. I invested time in:

mIRC script
NWN1 scripting engine
Win 95 era Visual Basic
Access 97 era VBA

Notice anything in common about these platforms?

The final kick was Labview. It was a fun language and, as a student, I didn't have to pay for it. Now of course I'm not a student so to update and reuse some nifty things I wrote as a student I would need to pay hundreds for a run time. Not smart.

Of course it's not useless. A lot of the things I learned have helped when programming in proper languages (C/perl/java/occam etc), and leaning for learning's sake is never a waste. But all of the things I wrote are now useless because someone else owns the platform they run on and I can't get or afford the environment.

Older and smarter I would have to be getting a healthy wage to write anything in a closed tool. I might be interested in learning DirectX 10 to steal the best ideas, but if I decide I want to do some 3D visualisation I'll do it on openGL thank you. I will also write my tools in the UNIX style, with exposed APIs and designed in the most modular fashion possible, since it makes them far more valuable in the long run.

back in the day....

before all the craplets that people push on unsuspecting facebookers, I really enjoyed the site. It was an excellent work alternative(tm) Now, however, it's just becoming a more cluttered myspace. I'm expecting the facebook people to next open up the possibility to 'personalize' their profile with gaudy poorly written code that crashes web browsers (or maybe just safari, which - to be honest - isn't the most stable inmate in the asylum). So much for being elegant, simple, and unique.

In a free market, the customer regulates

My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility.

In a free market, the customer regulates. In fact, by raising your concerns, you are doing it right now.

But the FREE MARKET!

My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility.

But REGULATION is BAD and the FREE MARKET will SOLVE ALL PROBLEMS!

Social Networking RFC Anyone?

To avoid situations like this, I wonder if anyone would be interested in proposing an RFC for a public, distributed social networking system. Much like IRC, that could be made redundant with multiple geographically diverse servers and more importantly couldn't be controlled by any one corporate entity.

Advertising revenue could be made by the "application" writers themselves, and the framework (something like Facebook) would become a commodity just like IRC became.

Facebook-like social networking without the corporate oversight could be a little more chaotic, but no more chaotic than every other distributed system on the Internet.

Re:Social Networking RFC Anyone?

My project, Appleseed [sourceforge.net], does just that. All the distributed functionality is in place, and it's at the point of rounding out the functionality, optimization, and then bug testing and cleanup.

It's open source, and uses a custom protocol, which is also open, although I would be open to modifying up the protocol at this point to make it easier for other applications to use

Developers..

It's because of developers like this that are making Facebook junk. It was one of the best networking applications on the net, now your getting all these frills that are really making it lame.

It's a business - right?

I'm ... more concerned about the lack of transparency in privately held social networks and the risks we take as developers when we invest time in a company's platform. ... My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility."

Answered your own question didn't you? If you don't like the way that they run their company, then don't deal with them.

Who exactly do you think should "regulate" them? How?

Right

> My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility.

Because we certainly don't want people going around doing things without permission, do we? An unregulated activity? How shocking!

Listen. It's a private company operating in an open market. If you don't like their rules take your business elsewhere. Want more "transparency"? Start your own "transparent" network.

Platform Application Terms of Use

To be honest, although going off at a tangent (or completely OT if you want to see it that way), I am MUCH more concerned (with apps in general on Facebook) with this little gem:

II. Consent Regarding Use of Facebook Site Information

(a) Information That May Be Provided to Developers. In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers ("Developer Applications"), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the "Facebook Site Information"):

(i) any information provided by you and visible to you on the Facebook Site, excluding any of your Contact Information, and

(ii) the user ID associated with your Facebook Site profile.

(b) Examples of Facebook Site Information. The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your "About Me" section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.

When one tries to add any application to their profile, it says, from which the above was quoted (emphasis mine):

Brief blurb. By clicking 'add', you agree to the Platform Application Terms of Use [facebook.com].

This guy is a spammer.

From the article: I saw a real opportunity for my site to reach a large new audience without a big marketing expense.

In other words, this guy had figured out a way to spam via Facebook. And he's complaining that they didn't process his application for a developer ID fast enough.

death to socialism

My concern with Facebook is that there's no one regulating the utility.

STFU Hugo Chavez. Hey, how about we nationalize "NewsCloud", whatever that is? How 'bout we "regulate" that utility? How would you like that?

Tollbooth to social relationship

The problem with social networking sites and many others is that they have the power to restrict access to your personal networks. If you make friends through facebook, or use the site to stay in touch, that relationship is owned by facebook. They have a leverage against you. If they decide to put interstitial ads or some other annoying thing on their site, you cant just migrate your friend network to myspace.

Mostly you can expect this not to happen, and if it does there is always the phone and e-mail, but a solution that is more node based and less reliant on all of your networks (social or physical) going through one company would be more like an actual social network, which grows organically and in a decentralized manner. Facebook, MySpace etc.. are more akin to an Elks Lodge or other association that is the singular source of social engagement for its members.

Which technologies exist now that operate outside of the single source model?

Wikis?

It amazes me that, in this day and age, there are still concerns like this around social networks. If you want community involvement in your platform - involve the community in its design! OSS and Wikipedia have proven that it is a workable model. That's why I've recently moved my blog+myspace profile over to a wiki-based social network: http://meopedia.com/en/User:Eric_Redmond [meopedia.com]

facebook vs myspace

I have been using Facebeeok for a few months.. I have to say I like Facebook SO much better than cluttered and mostly unreadable other social networking sites (MySpace and Yahoo 360)... I just hope that facebook doesn't go out to become another MySpace. The fact that it is so much more stripped down (and actually readable) is the reason I prefer it over MySpace or Yahoo 360.. In my opinion it isnt the 3rd part apps that are the problem.. it is the

Facebook approved my application today (sunday)

Not sure if it had anything to do with the Slashdot post - but the NewsCloud application [facebook.com] is now approved and listed in the Facebook Directory.

Re:Linus is right

Is this coy sarcasm? Or did you just post in the wrong thread? I'm rather confused.

Re:facebook nees to take one more step...

When you see an app you don't like on a profile, click the arrow to hide everything but the title, it'll be like that on every profile from then onwards.