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Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

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Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#131

Post by Silhouette »

jacques_chester wrote: post #102
Silhouette wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, that is the surest indicator of a bubble-like market. I think some of the recent valuations for companies with many users but no profit nor any obvious business model are dubious at best. However, I think the valuations for companies that depend exclusively on one framework/inftrastructure base provided by another mega-valued company are downright crazy. Companies like Facebook have come and gone before, and w…

What you're seeing here is leverage . Basing your business on Facebook gives you very high potential market exposure vs a total dependence on Facebook. It's analogical to buying shares with borrowed money. You've increased the potential upside, but now the downside is that much more catastrophic.

Exactly. And given what excessive leverage did to the world's financial markets not so very long ago, I think relying on that kind of leverage again in this market is crazy.

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#132

Post by gfodor »

Silhouette wrote: post #131
jacques_chester wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're seeing here is leverage . Basing your business on Facebook gives you very high potential market exposure vs a total dependence on Facebook. It's analogical to buying shares with borrowed money. You've increased the potential upside, but now the downside is that much more catastrophic.

Exactly. And given what excessive leverage did to the world's financial markets not so very long ago, I think relying on that kind of leverage again in this market is crazy.

This is a really bad argument. You're implying that the leverage discussed here (coupling your product with Facebook) is the same as the leverage that caused the financial crisis. The only thing they have in common is you can use the word "leverage" to describe either of them.

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#133

Post by stanleydrew »

butterfi wrote: post #53
stanleydrew wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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."

I agree the complaints sound similar. I'm not entirely convinced of the difference myself. I was just positing a likely reason for the difference in reaction to the two situations.

But I will also stick up for the user-centric perspective. I will never forget how Apple treated Google with respect to Google Voice. In that specific case Apple made up some very capricious arguments to avoid allowing an extremely useful app from appearing in the App Store, which would have hurt me directly had I owned an iPhone instead of an Android device.

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#134

Post by dman »

gfodor wrote: post #132
Silhouette wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And given what excessive leverage did to the world's financial markets not so very long ago, I think relying on that kind of leverage again in this market is crazy.

This is a really bad argument. You're implying that the leverage discussed here (coupling your product with Facebook) is the same as the leverage that caused the financial crisis. The only thing they have in common is you can use the word "leverage" to describe either of them.

The two leverages have another thing in common - risk.

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#135

Post by brown9-2 »

theli0nheart wrote: post #55

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…

For what it is worth at this point, I heard Breakup Notifier mentioned on a nationally syndicated morning radio show (http://www.elvisduran.com/main.html) while driving to work yesterday (locally it was on Z100 in NYC). A belated congrats!

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#136

Post by stanleydrew »

tptacek wrote: post #28
stanleydrew wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The "just jailbreak your phone" argument isn't useful in my opinion. It's an easy way to avoid the actually difficult questions that arise from what Apple has done with the App Store.

Would "just jailbreak your phone" be acceptable advice to give to your mother, who is always rolled out as the beneficiary of Apple's tight control over the App Store ecosystem, if she were to want to obtain the recently banned Readability app? If not, then we shouldn't be using it as a way to sweep these discussions under the rug.

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#137

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #28
stanleydrew wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

[deleted]

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#138

Post by nhebb »

theli0nheart wrote: post #68
jdp23 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They could at least have sent a Breakup Notification. It only there were an app for that ...

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#139

Post by Sticker »

JonnieCache wrote: post #129
soulclap wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. Or your 'false names' are not as 'flashy' as mine! I still thought it was quite harsh to just delete the account without any warning or notice at all. And I've got a lot of friends who aren't using their real names either and are getting away with it, no idea how they are tracking you down. Insisting on real names is a big part of what makes Facebook so uncool and corporate to me. I want the Myspace days ba…

A lot of people on my list have completely preposterous names that are clearly not real. I've changed mine many times to many stupid things and never had a problem.

Let's hope you get busted for missing the whole point of facebook and are quickly removed.

Honestly, how gutless can you be? Quite the charades you got going there, congrats! If that's what interests you...

Re: Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

#140

Post by Silhouette »

gfodor wrote: post #132
Silhouette wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And given what excessive leverage did to the world's financial markets not so very long ago, I think relying on that kind of leverage again in this market is crazy.

This is a really bad argument. You're implying that the leverage discussed here (coupling your product with Facebook) is the same as the leverage that caused the financial crisis. The only thing they have in common is you can use the word "leverage" to describe either of them.

Yes and no. If the companies in question are privately held then to a certain extent the risk is only with investors brave (or foolish) enough to back them. However, what do you think would happen to the tech industry, and potentially the wider world economy, if a big name company suddenly went up in smoke, public or otherwise?

Now, please pause for a moment and consider: it doesn't have to be Microsoft or Apple or Oracle. Some of the crazy valuations are putting much less robust companies within an order of magnitude. If one of them goes, it's going to be big news and stock prices right across hi-tech industry could race to the bottom scarily fast as we've seen before.

If you are, for example, Zynga, then the kind of disaster that could lead to catastrophic failure seems awfully difficult for you to anticipate or control. Likewise all kinds of new companies being built on Twitter and so on, keeping in mind that Twitter (as far as I know) doesn't actually make any money itself yet and could easily be displaced by the next new shiny thing tomorrow.

I'm not saying it's going to happen at all, never mind tomorrow, but there is definitely a house of cards building up here, and of such things, market bubbles are made.

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