141–150 of 169 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think FB would get some bad press if they offered a feature like this directly. Not for screwing over a developer (nobody but other developers care about that), but for the privacy violation/stalking feel the whole thing has.
You say that as if bad press or privacy concerns have had any impact on Facebook thus far.
They ignore bad press and privacy concerns in order to move the project forward in major ways. Like adding News Feeds, or allowing entirely classes of API interaction (Beacon). They don't do it for little features like breakup notifications.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably a bit overstated. Many, many companies are completely dependent on the Microsoft framework or the Oracle/Sun framework, yet there is not an issue with that. The bigger issue is they are dependent on frameworks that are still evolving at very high rates. Rapid changes brings a lot of chaos into the equation, which is dangerous from an investment perspective, but that same chaos can lead to unexpectedly…
But the difference is they're not dependent on the Microsoft presence. If Microsoft ceased to exist tomorrow (localised meteor strike, let's say), the code running on .NET, Windows, etc. will still work. If Facebook is down, so are you.
Breakup Notifier is an interesting idea and an example of the sort of engagement that developers can get on Facebook Platform (according to our stats this app had ~13k monthly Facebook users).
That said, we've built a number of automated systems that track people’s response to News Feed stories generated by apps to ensure they have a positive experience and to determine if a given app is violating our policies. These systems have worked well, cutting spam by 95% last year alone.
In this particular case, Breakup Notifier triggered one of our automated systems due to an excessive number of negative user reports. The system automatically shuts down access to the app while immediately notifying the developer via email; which is exactly what happened for Breakup Notifier. We take this action to preserve the user experience while giving our developer relations team time to work with the developer to correct the issue. We have been in contact with the developer since he followed back up with us. We hope to get the underlying issues resolved and get Breakup Notifier running again.
We want Facebook to be a great place for both people and developers — and we work very hard to ensure that we are balancing all the factors at play. We think our systems do a reasonable job helping us strike this balance, but we are open to feedback and constantly look to tune how we react to these situations.
Comments, flames, etc. welcomed.
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.
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.
So logically anyone who wants to ship a physical product should start by developing their own oil well and aluminium ore mine.
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.
So if my business relied on airfreight I am leveraged by the airlines, the airport owners, the aircraft makers, the pilots unions, the oil companies .... So logically anyone who wants to ship a physical product should start by developing their own oil well and aluminium ore mine.
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…
I work on the Platform team at Facebook and wanted to respond to some of the comments on this post. Breakup Notifier is an interesting idea and an example of the sort of engagement that developers can get on Facebook Platform (according to our stats this app had ~13k monthly Facebook users). That said, we've built a number of automated systems that track people’s response to News Feed stories generated by apps to ens…
How is the developer supposed to contact Facebook via a disabled user account?