I'm from China. Facebook is down for me like ... always.
I chuckled
Facebook was down
281–290 of 290 posts
Re: Facebook was down
#282Are 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…
As with all other stuff: it depends.
Using it for logins is really questionable. But if you are, for example, building a game for Facebook, it gives you many advantages, so occasional downtime is not really the biggest issue. Let's check the things you wrote about in gaming context:
- charging for the service later TRUE (viral is dead, you pay for the ads to get new players in)
- cut you out of a relationship with your own customer - somewhat FALSE (you can request e-mails from your customers, and have a direct contact afterwards). Even with fan pages, they are not cuting you out, but merely asking to pay to get your message to them
- require you to use their store TRUE, but every other platform does the same
- copy your idea and give it for free. FALSE - Facebook never made a game AFAIK
- squezee you margins. TRUE. I do notice that Cost Per Install for my games is getting higher the more I advertize, and that it suddenly jumped from about $0.15 per install to $0.50 per install a few days ago - about the same time when they switched to the new payment user interface.
Re: Facebook was down
#283Earlier 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…
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.
...apart from them owning Instagram.
It's naive to assume that a company will defend their subsidiary. I am not condoning how they treated you but your assertion of the app has nothing to do with Facebook is incredulous.
Re: Facebook was down
#284[deleted]
Because it is so cool to hate Facebook. You win the negativity award for today.
Re: Facebook was down
#285Who cares?
Re: Facebook was down
#286Re: Facebook was down
#287What if they accidentally deleted everything and don't have a backup?
You really think that could happen..
Re: Facebook was down
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
This happens to everyone. Unfortunately, it's not a good enough excuse when, for example, the corporate sites I run go down. No application, desktop or web app, is truly bulletproof.
Ok, but some are more than others. Facebook is not famous for its outages, as far as I know.
But they do have a liberal deploy policy which is to deploy all the time and fix issues later. Has bitten them before, but generally considered a good policy.
Re: Facebook was down
#289The least they could do is fix the date on the footer. :/ I have an app that shares tweets to Facebook http://2fb.me so don't "LIKE" what's happening
Just me or is it down... again?
Re: Facebook was down
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 201…
It's not one level of risk-reward, you need to take a look at your specific case to make the call. Formulating a blanket opinion about this outside of a specific context is not wise.
That said, your example doesn't demonstrate much risk at all. What are the incentives for FB to start charging for this? It just doesn't make any sense for them to give up that data and that control to try to squeeze existing site operators out of a buck. I mean, never say never, but the risk is much less than it was with Google Maps where you always had to be asking what Google was getting out of this expensive and difficult-to-build-your-own service.