"Facebook has also, inexplicably, disabled his personal account." Sure they can try and justify blocking the application by saying it made 'excessive API calls', but how do they justify disabling his personal account?
My guess is that the system that does this is completely automated. The number of API calls his app was making set off a flag for spam/spammer and his account was disabled accordingly.
Until he contacted them I wonder if any human was even aware that his app had been blocked. The interesting question here is how Facebook will respond in this instance.
And has reached 3.6 million users overnight. That's incredible! I bet the developer is kicking himself for not monetizing with ads right away, that's a lot of traffic and a lot of money.
As someone with little experience with monetization, which ad networks do you usually use on a site with - at the time - no traction? Yoggrt, Fusion Ads and Deck Network come to mind, but you can't use nor apply for them, so what does that leave you?
AdSense or affiliate ads (i.e., Match.com). No one said it was pretty.
Meta-question: Will this termination inspire the same anti-"proprietary walled garden" rhetoric as Apple's imposition of new terms for subscription sales? If not, why not?
You know, some people view their phone in an intimate, personal way - not much different from their car - so the idea that Apple feel it is their phone and not your phone is rather insulting. Such expectations don't exist when interacting with services.
> "We’re willing to comply with whatever they want us to (within reason)." This app wasn't taken down because of "an inordinate number of stream.publish calls." The question is how this app falls within acceptable behavior. Is it closer in nature to the acceptable practices (such as the FB Newsfeed where you see friends' recently changed statuses)? Or is it closer to behavior that FB wants to dissuade (such as an app…
My opinion is that this app does not violate the behavior that FB wants to dissuade. It sends an email that provides information that is already being provided by the user, it does not track or determine information that is otherwise not available.
"Facebook has also, inexplicably, disabled his personal account." Sure they can try and justify blocking the application by saying it made 'excessive API calls', but how do they justify disabling his personal account?
For this reason I think its fairly obvious that his personal account and the app were pulled for something more than excessive API calls.
And they disabled his personal account too. Not the best way to get yourself to be seen as a good platform for developers.
Disabling his account is either a display of creepy dictatorial power or an indication of incompetence and lack of common sense.
All of the above. Activists have been dealing with these kinds of issues for a long time. Facebook's processes are haphazard, they make arbitrary decisions without notifying people, their automated filters are prone to misjudgment, and they usually don't react until an issue starts to get significant attention.
Meta-question: Will this termination inspire the same anti-"proprietary walled garden" rhetoric as Apple's imposition of new terms for subscription sales? If not, why not?
If not, I suspect it's that most people already understand that a hosted service, like Facebook, is inherently a walled garden, and hence it's not surprising when something like this happens. Apple's control over what you can and can't do with hardware and software that you own is a little more alarming perhaps?
So jailbreak your phone. Then, re-evaluate 'ragenwalds question substituting "iOS App Store" for "iPhone".
> "We’re willing to comply with whatever they want us to (within reason)." This app wasn't taken down because of "an inordinate number of stream.publish calls." The question is how this app falls within acceptable behavior. Is it closer in nature to the acceptable practices (such as the FB Newsfeed where you see friends' recently changed statuses)? Or is it closer to behavior that FB wants to dissuade (such as an app…
My opinion is that this app does not violate the behavior that FB wants to dissuade. It sends an email that provides information that is already being provided by the user, it does not track or determine information that is otherwise not available.
Facebook does not want to provide that information.
Twitter is similar in that they ask you to not publish deleted tweets.
> "We’re willing to comply with whatever they want us to (within reason)." This app wasn't taken down because of "an inordinate number of stream.publish calls." The question is how this app falls within acceptable behavior. Is it closer in nature to the acceptable practices (such as the FB Newsfeed where you see friends' recently changed statuses)? Or is it closer to behavior that FB wants to dissuade (such as an app…
My opinion is that this app does not violate the behavior that FB wants to dissuade. It sends an email that provides information that is already being provided by the user, it does not track or determine information that is otherwise not available.
Is the info being provided by the user, or is the app detecting info that is no longer being provided by the user, i.e. lack of friend status is not the same as a notification that you are no longer friends. If the deal is with regard to the former, I can easily imagine that FB doesn't tell you these things intentionally. If they leave it as a silent disconnect, they can construct their TOU to prohibit detecting connection state since FB does not actually provide that data. I guess in other words, FB may simply prohibit extracting any information from their service that they do not explicitly provide.