I have had a difficult reading relationship with pandodaily. After some good initial articles, they started producing trash. This article, for a change, is reasonably good.
The sad story of Facebook Platform
11–20 of 105 posts
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#12Facebook made three clear mistakes: - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. - Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks). - Breaking things con…
My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning.
When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change-policy/
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#13Here is the money line (IMO):
> Outside of games, there has been no killer Facebook app.
Given the current policies, I'm not sure what killer app could exist other than maybe dating.
I've done a lot of fiddling and prototyping on the Facebook platform and API (albeit mostly on the business/page side). With every-changing policies and API specs, no startup founder should consider anything more than Facebook "features"–never anything your business model hinges on.
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#14“We’ve designed Facebook Platform so that applications from third-party developers are on a level playing field with applications built by Facebook" I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".
I think Zuckerberg was especially naive in this regard; I suspect he truly thought FB could successfully execute the "totally fair and open platform" strategy. Reality did not agree.
To be fair, other platforms had done so in the past: Windows, OSX, even iOS (though less so). I figure the problem was at least somewhat because you couldn't match Facebook's "native apps" with 3rd party-- it was a technically weak platform.
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#15“We’ve designed Facebook Platform so that applications from third-party developers are on a level playing field with applications built by Facebook" I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".
>I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".
I don't blame people who would think that back in 2007. This was a new way to build and deploy applications. It could very well have worked out great (e.g. Amazon for example, has been largely successful in building an e-commerce platform for third party vendors that also compete with them. Not to mention competitors (e.g. Netflix) using AWS). Having said that, after developers were burned by Facebook, Twitter and Google, I don't think anyone should trust social-cloud platforms enough to base their entire business on them.
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#16Back in 2007... http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/my-email-to-mark-zuckerberg-abou...
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#17The two most painful patterns over the course of Platforms early life were:
1. The lack of timely bug fixes and the lack of internal Facebook developer contact with external developers. The only consistent employee at Facebook in the IRC channel was Joel Seligstein. I also actually directly heard one of the Platform PMs say that she thought "triage" meant high priority. They did hold events but that was more a social gathering than anything.
2. The ridiculous lack of spam control and enforcement of policies on the large developers. It's easy to see why people started disliking apps looking back at how much time users had to spend sifting through spam notifications!
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#18Here is the money line (IMO): > Outside of games, there has been no killer Facebook app. Given the current policies, I'm not sure what killer app could exist other than maybe dating. I've done a lot of fiddling and prototyping on the Facebook platform and API (albeit mostly on the business/page side). With every-changing policies and API specs, no startup founder should consider anything more than Facebook "features"…
I agree with you- basing a startup on one of these platforms is incredibly risky (on top of the standard high risk that all startups have).
I myself have written a TON of code for Twitter, for example, that is no longer useful due to ever-increasing restrictions on the Twitter API (combined with the network growing more and more. I want my 20k API requests per hour back!). Since these platforms can change their terms and access at any moment, you could easily have a great idea and implementation that they invalidate accidentally (or intentionally). That's just too much risk for me.
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#19Facebook made three clear mistakes: - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. - Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks). - Breaking things con…
My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning. When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: https://developers.facebook.co…
I built https://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/ in 2012 and even up to there, FB changed things all the time without any warning.
Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform
#20Facebook made three clear mistakes: - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. - Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove) access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user feedback (in the form of clicks). - Breaking things con…
Even though it generally drives me nuts, the "move fast and break things" mindset can work in some situations. Building a platform for others to rely upon is not one of them. I never understood why they repeatedly broke their platform so much, unless they honestly did not care how it affected those downstream. But if they didn't care, why even build a platform? Even the most cowboy of coders can see why always breaking others is bad. Baffling.