Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

blog.pixamid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 44 posts

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#11

Post by chrislomax »

bbd37 wrote: post #8
chrislomax wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the developement time on the app compared to if you had implemented a full system with photo upload etc? Was time a factor?

Sure, it was a factor. The whole backend was built in 3 months, photo upload would have added another few weeks. But again, we aimed not to do that at all, wanted to be more virtual. At least until we heard form enough users that they wanted that option.

It's good you managed to find out what the issue with Facebook was and that they allowed the re-submitted application.

I not had the chance to work with any of the social networks or app stores yet. I am currently in the process of being commissioned to do an Android app, I'm a little concerned myself about running into red tape.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#12

Post by bbd37 »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #9

It seems that neither Apple nor Facebook is particularly attentive to the developers who build on their platforms once the app is released. Curious models for companies whose success is largely due to the developer community.

It is a matter of scale to a large degree - supporting so many developers efficiently, while still preventing harmful abuse. They both could improve in many ways, for sure, and given the contributions developers are making.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#13

Post by rmc »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #9

It seems that neither Apple nor Facebook is particularly attentive to the developers who build on their platforms once the app is released. Curious models for companies whose success is largely due to the developer community.

Apple and Facebook don't get success from having lots of developers, they get success cause their users get access to some cool apps. If they burn X% of developers, then that's OK. Lots of their users don't complain about apps they never saw.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#14

Post by aaronmarks »

dansingerman wrote: post #3

As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours. By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

This seems like a really valid and important point. Yet companies who do build their entire business on other companies' info / APIS (Think Greplin, Trendrr, Tweetdeck, etc.) still get tons of interest from investors. While it is easy to realize the importance of developing an independent business when commenting on HN, I think the startup community as a whole needs to start displaying this in its actions.

Once more large internet companies realize that their users (both of their services and API) are not necessarily their customers (Think Twitter's denial of new 3rd party clients), the API free-for-all which we're experiencing right now will dry up, and we'll see at least one of the companies-who-are-built-on-other-companies fail. This might be the kick in the pants that the startup community needs to realize the importance of building unique, independent businesses.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#15

Post by rmc »

chrislomax wrote: post #4

I would honestly never rely solely on one system, unless that system was my own. You never know what might happen in a years time. Everyone might realise that Facebook is actually worth £10 and it just drops out the sky altogehter. One of the developers here was building a newsletter system recently and they wanted to use just one 3rd party mail system to manage the user lists and groups etc. I stressed that we must…

You have to trust someone. Unless you're using multiple datacentres, you are trusting your datacentre/hosting provider. All it takes is one billing dispute before they turn you off.

Re: mailing list, the great thing about email (unlike facebook), is you can change how you send you emails and your end user can still get your emails, and they don't know you've changed. Whereas with Facebook, you can't just change to (say) Diaspora without affecting your users.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#16

Post by dansingerman »

aaronmarks wrote: post #14
dansingerman wrote: post #3

As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours. By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

This seems like a really valid and important point. Yet companies who do build their entire business on other companies' info / APIS (Think Greplin, Trendrr, Tweetdeck, etc.) still get tons of interest from investors. While it is easy to realize the importance of developing an independent business when commenting on HN, I think the startup community as a whole needs to start displaying this in its actions. Once more…

While not the perfect situation, I think companies like Greplin, that use multiple APIs across multiple third parties, are at least able to offer a service should one (or a few) of those APIs become inaccessible for any reason.

Much better than your business relying on a single third Party (as in the featured article), where should you cease to have access you are completely screwed.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#17

Post by ignifero »

dansingerman wrote: post #3

As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours. By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

You do not rely on other companies only when you rely on open standards. Web development is an example (although you indirectly rely on Google for example). All kinds of apps usually rely on an underlying commercial technology ( windows development, osx development, ios development) whose actions are outside your control.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#18

Post by clammer »

dansingerman wrote: post #3

As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours. By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

>As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned to yours.

I don't think truer words were ever spoken. I just shut down http://NotifyWire.com because I built it against Craigslist (albeit an unwilling entity), but still as Twitter has proven a partner can go from willing to unwilling very quickly.

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#19

Post by _wp3r »

Can anyone reference some community that was destroyed or is being destroyed by the quote

"Deactivating apps without warning, and with no recourse, will seriously hinder Facebook’s ecosystem growth amongst “real developers,” leaving just the scammers and spammers. " Is adwords and adsense in this same trend? Does the need for spam and scam control outway the cost?

Re: The Dangers of Relying on Facebook

#20

Post by chrislomax »

rmc wrote: post #15
chrislomax wrote: post #4

I would honestly never rely solely on one system, unless that system was my own. You never know what might happen in a years time. Everyone might realise that Facebook is actually worth £10 and it just drops out the sky altogehter. One of the developers here was building a newsletter system recently and they wanted to use just one 3rd party mail system to manage the user lists and groups etc. I stressed that we must…

You have to trust someone. Unless you're using multiple datacentres, you are trusting your datacentre/hosting provider. All it takes is one billing dispute before they turn you off. Re: mailing list, the great thing about email (unlike facebook), is you can change how you send you emails and your end user can still get your emails, and they don't know you've changed. Whereas with Facebook, you can't just change to (s…

I appreciate what you are saying but I know that if I pay my bills and I handle my own redundancy I am only responsible for myself. The level of dependency you are referring to would get you stuck in a recursive loop of never trusting anyone!

What I am saying is, if this company had stored the pics on their own server then they could still retrieve the pictures. You would then push the pictures to Facebook, Diaspora, Twitter etc. The company were using the data storing capabilities in Facebook to store the pictures, hence the high dependency on Facebook.

If in the instance I mentioned, Facebook cancel the app, you would still have the pics on your server and the user could see them and post them elsewhere

Post reply on HN