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

Facebook was down

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 290 posts

Re: Facebook was down

#271

Post by dasil003 »

grey-area wrote: post #195
Rygu wrote: post #24

Are their APIs and Sign in with Facebook, also down? That's pretty messed up for all the sites that rely on their Sign in.

This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margin…

I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook.

If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management, but you allow third-party authentication that ties into that account, especially allowing multiple OAuth providers to be linked to a single of your internal accounts (eg. see how Stack Overflow works), you can significantly mitigate the downside.

The purist and old-school web head and open standards guy in me hates it, but you can't argue with the business case for it.

Re: Facebook was down

#272

Post by pling »

pjc50 wrote: post #232
grey-area wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margin…

If your business is "facebook games", it's rather hard not to build it on Facebook.

If your business is facebook games, about all that happens if you go down is "meh". Is that a good business model?

Probably not.

Re: Facebook was down

#273

Post by peterkelly »

kccqzy wrote: post #25

Apparently Facebook over IPv6 is working: https://www.v6.facebook.com % curl -I https://www.v6.facebook.com HTTP/1.1 200 OK Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=7776000 X-Frame-Options: DENY X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p" Pragma: no-cache X-XSS-Protection: 0 Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2…

I think this would be the perfect "push" to get the world to transition to IPv6 :)

Re: Facebook was down

#274

Post by acheron »

blueskin_ wrote: post #264
jacquesm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming use of logical operators and regular speech is not compatible. I agree that this is a bug in the English language but this is a forum, not a computer program.

I'm having a bit of trouble finding the maintainer. Possibly OED, but they don't have much in the way of API documentation and I still haven't found the revision history for the source to submit a patch.

Let me know when you find them. Someone removed Þ from the alphabet a few revisions back but I've got a patch to add it back in.

Re: Facebook was down

#275

Post by sprite »

grey-area wrote: post #195
Rygu wrote: post #24

Are their APIs and Sign in with Facebook, also down? That's pretty messed up for all the sites that rely on their Sign in.

This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margin…

Facebook deleted my personal account and disabled all my fb API keys for releasing an app for Instagram that they claim violates the Instagram tos. The app has nothing to do with Facebook. This was done with no warning.

Re: Facebook was down

#276

Post by DanielStraight »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #243
syf81 wrote: post #213

Definitely news worthy, pretty much like a 'first post!' post.

One of the most popular websites in the world (that over 1/7th of the worlds population use) going down is newsworthy.

No one is ever going to see this post, but... no, it isn't. All sites experience downtime occasionally. Unless it is for some interesting technical reason or it is extended beyond a couple of hours, there is nothing newsworthy about it whatsoever. There is certainly nothing that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity about it.

Re: Facebook was down

#277

Post by drewblay »

dasil003 wrote: post #271
grey-area wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margin…

I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook. If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management,…

>there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email

There is a simple solution to this. STOP ASKING USERS TO SIGN UP! Do your REALLY need to collect the users e-mail? Do REALLY need them to have an account at all? If you do, then when they register don't ask for their e-mail address if it isn't necessary, or at least make the e-mail address an optional field. Hacker News never asked for my e-mail, because there is no need for them to have it. I probably wouldn't have made an account if it did require an e-mail address.

Re: Facebook was down

#278

Post by grey-area »

dasil003 wrote: post #271
grey-area wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margin…

I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook. If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management,…

Sure, it's a trade-off, we probably just disagree about the level of risk involved and the benefits gained.

As you say with FB login there are ways to mitigate that risk, but to take one example - if FB charge for the service in future at 0.01c per use, many of your users will still want to login with FB because it's easier for them, and you'll be stuck with the bill. This happened with sites using google maps in 2012 when they started charging - each of these decisions has to be weighed up individually as a risk, but I think login is too important to delegate to another site and a significant addition of complexity and risk.

Post reply on HN