The sad story of Facebook Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#71

Post by ripter » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

jbert wrote: post #63

ripter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

I'm not an fb developer and don't know the platform, but was that documented as the format? i.e. were you expected/allowed to destructure an id in that way or was it intended to be opaque?

You are allowed to deconstruct the id that way because it's the only way to get the information. It's not a property or value, it's part of the id. You then use these three parts to get the rest of the information.

It's not documented as a format (very little is) but it's been this way since at least 2011-ish.

If there is a better way to get this information it is also undocumented.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#72

Post by threeseed » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 9:27 PM UTC

colinhowe wrote: post #35

badman_ting wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 breaki…

I wonder what this mindset does for the future employability of FB people, do people really want to employ people who are (basically) reckless?

I don't know if you are a developer or not. But the entire industry is moving towards the Facebook model i.e. those people would be highly desired in many places. The "theory" is that developers can't be reckless because all of the automated testing that goes on before anything is put into production.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#73

Post by prostoalex » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 9:41 PM UTC

mratzloff wrote: post #70

prostoalex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid. It was not completely obvious in 2007 that in-app virtual item transactions were to stay. Facebook itself was playing around with virtual gifts, but convincing users to pull out their credit card on a social network was novel. It was pretty hard to predict specific monetization pattern - iLike looked into ticket-sell…

Was it that hard? "If you make money on our platform, you need to give us a percentage," seems sort of like an obvious monetization strategy. Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?

Most of the apps at the time optimized for pageviews and monetized through DoubleClick, AdSense and other third-party ad networks, so there was non-trivial task of proving that "making money" was happening, followed by further non-trivial task of actually collecting such revenue from all of the jurisdictions.

>> Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?

Facebook displays its own ads on application canvas pages. Therefore higher engagement with apps => higher pageviews => higher earnings.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#74

Post by return0 » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:00 PM UTC

Eduard wrote: post #12

mratzloff wrote: post #5

Facebook 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…

Preannounced or not, the fact is it's a dizzying rate for independent developers to catch up with.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#75

Post by return0 » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:01 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #59

ripter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."

It's odd that they chose stackoverflow for their support system, because most of the answered questions there are way obsolete by now.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#76

Post by return0 » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:03 PM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #8

“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".

Truth is , facebook itself did not actually compete with developers, Zynga did (they had a special contract with facebook for a few years)

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#77

Post by steven2012 » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

This has unfortunately been my experience with the Facebook Platform as well. I remember talking with someone 5 years ago, saying that Facebook would be the one site that they log into in the morning, they would get their daily news, their friends updates, their word processing, etc. They would never have to leave the site.

Instead, it hasn't done any of this, and their best attempt at monetization is "Would you like to buy your friend a gift on their birthday?"

It was obvious with Zynga how quickly things could go viral, and yes, sometimes things were extremely spammy, but for the most part, you could have a lot of fun apps on Facebook. Now, there are almost no apps left, except core Facebook. The only thing people appear to use it for is to get login information, or for mobile-type contacts information.

I tried making my own Facebook app, and ran into a bunch of issues, including really poor documentation. You couldn't even google for things, because things changed so quickly that you couldn't tell which was the most recent information. It wasn't a pleasant experience at all. It's too bad, because like the article says, there was so much more potential than what it has turned into. And I know people have been saying this for years, but I really am seeing a lot more of my friends simply stop logging into Facebook now, because it's boring. It will be interesting to see if they have what it takes to make bold, innovative moves to make the platform more attractive again.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#78

Post by return0 » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:11 PM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #13

Here 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"…

Facebook insistently tried and failed to help "serious" non-game apps before. I don't understand what's the problem with games and why they don't capitalize on it (they should have bought zynga). Facebook is too crowded for anything more serious than gossip.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#79

Post by aboodman » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

jgon wrote: post #57

Reading this article the one idea that persisted in my head was that this was a case of people not really knowing anything about ecology trying to create an ecosystem. Sure they used the word "Platform" and maybe that was actually the first clue, but what they really wanted was an ecosystem of actors creating increased value for their domain. I think that my favorite piece of writing by Cory Doctorow is his essay "Al…

This is an overly simplistic analogy.

No platform developer, when faced with weeds would say "let's torch it".

What really happened in my opinion is that they tried a weed killer. However, as in real gardening, it turned out that distinguishing a weed from a non-weed is complex, subtle, and full of value judgments. In some cases, even if a plant has weed-like traits or capabilities, it's not a weed in the eyes of the gardener. It depends how the capabilities are used.

There were also cascading effects (and here is where I really stretch the metaphor). Once a few non-weed members of the ecosystem were killed, the garden suddenly looked a lot less inviting to others.

Re: The sad story of Facebook Platform

#80

Post by jeena » Tue, Jul 23, 2013, 10:32 PM UTC

Back then I also was working on a Facebook app, not only working but I even finished it. You were find restaurants in whole europe and book a table right from facebook inviting your friends and stuff. We were just kicking in the advertising machinery when we found out that one of our core features, messaging your friends (about that you got a table for all of you) wasn't allowed anymore. This was one of the main reasons our application never took of, the other was that FBML was really slow, so while I had a normal HTML view which rendered in perhaps 300 ms the roundtrip for FBML from the browser to a facebook server then to our server then back to facebook and finally to the browser always took more then two seconds.

But honestly, even if I was disappointed about all the fuckups we as developers had to deal with, as a user I am really happy about the fact that there are no attention claiming apps on Facebook, it is actually therefore I still use Facebook, in my free time as a normal user.