Live data from Hacker News

Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

techcrunch.com

61–70 of 169 posts

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#61
In the brick and mortar world, it's extremely difficult to secure financing, investment, or even revenue if you're more than 50% dependent on an outside entity for your survival.

Yet in the digital world, 100% dependency on another entity is becoming more and more common. Sounds like a high wire act without a net. Best to find other distribution outlets before you lose your balance.

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that you're taking a user-centric approach to the issue, but the majority of complaints I seem to hear about Apple come from developers who want to deploy on/in Apple's space (which includes hardware, but more often concerns iTunes). These two complaints sound very similar: "company X won't let me do what I want to do in their environment."

And that is the crux of the difference: some people disagree with you that the hardware which they purchased is "Apple's hardware".

Hard to tell what the parent meant, but I took "Apple's hardware" to mean the infrastructure that runs the App Store and iTunes platform (like using Facebook's hardware to run there).

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#64
post #3

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.

Yep, I'm kicking myself. And to think I was just about to implement Facebook Credits. Fool me once...

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#65

It's been a crazy 36 hours since I last posted here about my weekend project. This morning, I woke up to an email from Facebook Platform, saying that the application has gotten disabled. Full text of the email is at http://lts.cr/PRh I'm not using stream.publish, and I'm checking for updates as little as possible. Also, it seems it was deleted from my apps...so they didn't just disable it. It's gone for good. I may o…

So they didn't even give you any notice, just "boom you're gone"? Disappointing.

Some of the suggestions in "How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech" might be helpful -- http://www.talesfromthe.net/blog/?p=28

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#67
post #61

In the brick and mortar world, it's extremely difficult to secure financing, investment, or even revenue if you're more than 50% dependent on an outside entity for your survival. Yet in the digital world, 100% dependency on another entity is becoming more and more common. Sounds like a high wire act without a net. Best to find other distribution outlets before you lose your balance.

On credit applications our business bank specifically asks if more than 25% of your revenue came from one source in the past calendar year.

If you think about it, a typical brick and mortar gets its money from hundreds if not thousands of customers every year (restaurant/cafe, auto mechanic, etc).

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#68
post #65

It's been a crazy 36 hours since I last posted here about my weekend project. This morning, I woke up to an email from Facebook Platform, saying that the application has gotten disabled. Full text of the email is at http://lts.cr/PRh I'm not using stream.publish, and I'm checking for updates as little as possible. Also, it seems it was deleted from my apps...so they didn't just disable it. It's gone for good. I may o…

So they didn't even give you any notice, just "boom you're gone"? Disappointing. Some of the suggestions in "How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech" might be helpful -- http://www.talesfromthe.net/blog/?p=28

Nope, zero notice. It was basically "Poof!" and then the app wouldn't work. Doubly annoying since I was sleeping when it was deactivated (4am PST).

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#69

This introduces a new way to get kicked out of a walled garden: become too successful. I hate to be cynical, but of course it's always been that way. The only way to get punished in a walled garden scenario is to embarrass the garden owner or bring too much attention to yourself.

Well, let's see if FB really meant to kick the app out. If it's just a matter of unintended behavior from automated filters, it's more an example of "the way to get kicked off of Facebook is to deviate from the norms they expect."

As Zuckerberg says, the system looks for 'outlying' behavior. "If you behave like an average user you should never trigger the algorithms that will get you kicked off." http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=336

"

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this reason I think its fairly obvious that his personal account and the app were pulled for something more than excessive API calls.

I think a more reasonable interpretation is the app was pulled for being spammy and the developer of the app was pulled for being a spammer. I think the implication that there is something sinister in this is reaching.

Breakup Notifier only sent out email notifications for relationship changes for those who explicitly asked for them. You could easily disable it by either personally blocking the app on Facebook, or unselecting those friends.
Post reply on HN