Thinking about using Facebook Connect on your site? Step one: Abandon your will to live.

Why are you so eager to jump to their defense, but so reluctant to ask that they treat me with courtesy, dignity, and respect?

I do, however, agree with you. As I mentioned in the note, I did spend a lot of time responding courteously to a great deal of personal user feedback. Having invested significant time doing so, I know and fully appreciate the difference it makes. I am also personally appreciative when I am on the receiving end -- I enjoy the thoughtful personal feedback people take the time to send me, even if it is critical.

I only responded in this manner to the most intensely offensive and bigoted messages received. I was sent thousands of personal messages in the span of a few days, a pretty good portion of which suggested I should die.

I also agree with diN0bot. The professional decision is to simply ignore personal attacks in a professional context. In this case I can ask forgiveness for a momentary lapse, call attention to the tricky distinction between personal and professional contexts on Facebook, and chalk some of this behavior up to stress relief during a period of highly intense work.

You are _always_ a representative of Facebook. You can't get away from it, and every thing you do reflects back upon Facebook, just like everything that guy does represents Christianity. This is important to know.

That said, there's no contextual distinction here; using a personal account isn't enough to dissociate your professional responsibilities. Especially not when you're replying to a Facebook user's inquiry directed to you specifically because of your employment at Facebook. Any response to that is obviously going to directly reflect upon your employer, and responding to customer inquiries is obviously a part in line with your duties as a Facebook employee. There is no contextual distinction simply because your response was posted on your personal page and not an official company-sponsored page.

I should probably clarify. I've worked with the Facebook Platform since it was launched at F8 in 2007. I definitely agree with and appreciate the idea. I also understand that the company is pretty inundated with response that they've had.

However, I can personally keep up with the number of bug reports. Most of them go unnoticed. Unfortunately, it seems like only the absolute giants (the entire platform being down, for instance) and a few random ones get attention at all. For example, two major incomplete parts of the platform: support for the Info tab, which was planned, seems like it was just abandoned. How long has the "new" Facebook been out? Another major recent one -- businesses can sign up for accounts without creating a profile. This special business account can manage a business Page, but that's it. Unfortunately, _no_ applications work with these new "business accounts" because the platform basically doesn't validate this type of user. I get messages about this on a daily basis, and I run just one application. I've been in touch with the Senior Platform Manager and the Platform Program Manager, but nothing has changed.

I can also say, more importantly, that there are regularly problems with it in general. Like what has been mentioned here already, things break at random, unannounced times. I've noticed that other, announced changes have been given too little notice for developers to keep up. And most frustratingly, when you start building on a buggy and incomplete platform, you can often spend copious amounts of time trying to find a bug in your code, only to find out that the bug is in fact Facebook's. I'm sure that any of the active developers in the community will tell you the best piece of advice -- when there's a problem with your app, always assume it's Facebook's fault first.

And it's tough dealing with a problem when it's out of your hands. When you get that rush of messages from your users about something breaking, it's embarrassing telling them that it's something you can't fix. It happens regularly. The users assume it's your fault, and your application is penalized for it (users remove it, give it bad reviews).

Anyway, this is enough ranting. I'm not sure if it's a staffing problem or what, but hopefully these APIs will receive more attention one day.

Sorry to be a hater. I was gung ho OpenID for a while...simple for users, decentralized. But then I tried to get my wife and my mom to log into my site with it and they were baffled. "Login with Facebook" they can sort of get. And then I found that the openid consumer I wrote (I used some library, I don't remember which) didn't work with yahoo and a bunch of other providers, which really got my goat.

But when I said I was happy OpenID was gone, it was more because I think we're one step closer to whatever will be a better, widely-accepted, and more polished solution, not because of any particular disdain for openid. I'm fascinated that Facebook would join OpenID. http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html. Sounds like a fox in the henhouse to me.