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Facebook To App Developers: Good Idea, Now Stop Using Our API
An anonymous reader writes "In what seems to be a recurring theme with Facebook as the social networking giant adds features, competing apps that use Facebook integration risk being cut off due to the terms of service surrounding the API. For example, 'Voxer CEO Tom Katis told AllThingsD that the company got an email on Thursday saying that Facebook wanted to hold a phone call to discuss possible violations of a section of the company’s terms of service. The section in question centers around the use of Facebook’s social graph by competing social networks.' Similarly, 'Within hours of Twitter launching its Vine video-sharing application on Thursday, Facebook has cut off access to Vine’s "find people" feature, which used to let Vine users find their Facebook friends using the Vine application.' You have to ask yourself: is it really worth developing an app that integrates with, or worse runs completely on Facebook's platform?"
Why does Facebook even offer an API to developers if any time an app becomes popular they block them?
But the answer to the question is still "no."
Obviously not.
If Facebook pays me: Sure.
Why would you ever design a product that's completely and utterly dependent on a service provided by someone else, especially someone else who you view as a competitor or who may down the road view you as a competitor, without an iron-clad, air-tight contract guaranteeing exactly what services they'll provide you and providing scorched-earth-level penalties for their failure to provide service according to the agreed-upon terms? Anything less is pretty much a guarantee that they'll pull the rug out from under you as soon as they think it'll be to their advantage. I'm not a business type or some super startup guru, just a lowly techie, but even I can figure that one out. Gleh, what do they teach in school these days? That the Universe is all rainbows and unicorns and that everybody plays nice all the time?
Most anyone running a business should know to diversify their product offering. Relying on a single platform for Your product is dooming yourself to failure. Relying on a single API, which you don't control, to run your business, is an even bigger mistake.
"Kindly fuck off. Love and Kisses."
In prison, "work" is the best possible approximation of real work but it is not real work with real responsibilities or control, and there is not real pay and conditions.
Making an "application" based on a digital prison is an approximation of a real app but based on a false foundation. There is no real control or security over the platform.
My little Linux and tech blog
Who do they think they are, Apple?
What exactly is the advantage to the developer?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Everybody's on Facebook, so it's much easier for your users to find their friends if your app is integrated with Facebook.
First they get you hooked, then they cut you off and extort you. Social media, nothnx, I have a actual life.
KERNEL PANIC -SIGFAULT AT ADDRESS #51A54D07
As if there was any question?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
No, you don't. The answer should be obvious. It's not worth it.
I don't think Facebook would be able to block automatic loading of pages (using the user's current cookies) followed by scraping. An API just makes it much easier to get the data, but you can still scrape whatever they won't let you use.
followed by "We're big now, and must protect what WE have made".
followed by "Hey wait, come back! We can be a little more open!"
followed by the NextBigThing (they're open!)
I'm not familiar with the US antitrust law, but isn't there a possible violation?
It's really handy for a social network to have an API for login purposes alone. I have a site that sees quite a bit of traffic and the "Log in with [Social Network]" feature is useful for casual users. Facebook has always been a pain in the ass with their API. They make unannounced changes every so often that break login functionality. Twitter's API on the other hand, has always worked just fine.
The game.
If their API (which I have not seen) lets see more than one in-link or out-link deep, then a crawler could traverse much of the total FB friend network. Their terms of service appear to prohibit crawling. They ASK the app just operate on the user and immediate friends at hand.
There were more efficient functions in the deep code which werent exposed to the outside world. Internal developers could write more efficient applications than 3rd party.
Limiting the scope of an external API is often done to improve testing and documentation. Too wide an interface is harder to support.
Many many people, and therefor companies, are under the delusion that business is fair. Facebook would never do them wrong, hell they gave me an API right? They ignore what business practices are at the level of Facebook. It's parasitic at worst, thuggery most of the time, and the occasional tip to the waiter when things are just right.
It's really really hard to explain this to people that are brought up without the ability to see what is actually happening, but rather rely on voices to tell them what they should do.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The idea was that you would go into Vine, Vine would search your facebook profile for friends of yours who were also using Vine and add them to Vine's friend list for you. That is providing real functionality. Now you have to manually search for and enter each of your friends one by one. So no, they aren't just jumping on the bandwagon, they are using the information from the Facebook API in a way that is so incredibly obvious that the fact that it is blocked makes you wonder what the hell the API was supposed to be fore in the first place.
From Facebook's perspective, the API is supposed to make being on Facebook more valuable and, therefore, help to retain users. Facebook's main asset is isn't user base. Facebook has the users, other sites don't and Facebook would like to keep it that way. Marketing to those users is how Facebook makes its money.
What you are describing is a migration tool. Once your Facebook friends have been moved to your Vine friends list, Vine doesn't need Facebook anymore and will be competing for those user's attention. I'm pretty sure this is not what Facebook Corporate had in mind.
When a corporation offers you a API, you need to keep in mind that they are doing it for themselves, not for you. If what you do with the API does not advance the business of the corporation, don't be surprised if they cut you off.
I know Facebook told you to stop using their API, but you really are taking it hard with all that LSD usage huh.
I know that there's this other social networking site called Google +, but hasn't FB already achieved a mass worthy of the attention of anti-trust regulators? This is the sort of action that got Microsoft and lately Google into trouble. Or does one need to pass a certain threshold of dominance to qualify as an evil monopoly?
Facebook Integration is intended to add to new things to facebook, or add some features to your sites from facebook such as authentication, adding like/comment type functionality, etc. I don't believe they ever wanted people to utilize the API to display facebook content on other sites or data mine the information just to provide an alternative interface to the same content. Facebook integration is great, it does all kinds of things and they have been pretty good with their API so far. A few people went too far and are rightfully being stopped. Do not make a big deal of this or they are likely to make changes to the actual API, instead of stopping the few people abusing the current one. Again , stop making a big deal out of this before you force Facebook to remove features from the API until nobody can abuse it (and at the same time making it a useless API for anything more than basic features)
http://interserver.net/
If people still asking why ... ask them to look at North Korea.
Facebook is a walled garden, and the "walled" part of a walled garden is just that, WALLED.
Which means, FB can do whatever it likes in its domain, just like the North Korean government can do whatever it likes within the sovereignty of North Korea.
They are accountable to nobody, and they do not have to answer to anything.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
ponemon, pokemon :)... looks the same to me
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
It would wither and die no matter how much stock is thrown around to save it.
The massive Friend's data is the pull that keeps developers hooked but there have been too many incidents recently of FB strangling innovation by launching competing products by copying (Snapchat) or not letting their data be used anywhere except FB itself (Yandex, Vine)
I was 10 days away from launching an iphone app which did nearly what graph search does when they launched and was sad that I was late, but now am not since I heard what they did to Yandex.
It's not just Facebook. All web sites are giving each other crap about people linking and embedding their content. Twitter is whining about getting cut of because of Vine is crocodile tears. They did the same to Facebook owned Instagram just a few months back. This is Facebook playing by Twitters rules. The web used to be about linking and combining each others strong points, but those days are over now. Companies seem to think that compatibility with others will be their downfall and anyone linking to their app or content must be eliminated by blocking them or suing them into oblivion. News papers want money from Google for news links, APIs are suddenly only to be used for features that some company has not (yet) developed itself.
We need change and competition to keep innovation going. If it wasn't for countries grossly evading and ignoring our environmental, labor and IP regulations, we'd still be in 1970, more or less. Humanity and human beings have built their entire civilization and culture on this embrace and extend thing and blocking yourself of it, will guarantee you will be left behind as a company. How many horse and carriage drivers went jobless because they refused to learn to drive an automobile? Did their protests stop the rest of the world to drive cars? People will eventually find a way around or without your product and you'll be the one with the outdated, non complying setup that everyone left for the competition.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
That's all I had to say.
Privacy is terrorism.
From there you can munge the list of nets into a list of firewall rules and add them to your firewall. No more tracking by Facebook.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
If FB was a simple website hosting some data, I'd agree. But it is the meeting place of 1 billion people, and we should have a say on what affects us.
You don't get no say.
Officially, you are a product that FB sells to their advertisers.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is why: https://developers.facebook.com/preferredmarketingdevelopers/
In general its not smart to be dependant on a single partner for your core functionality. A simple Porter's analysis will help you determine this. In essence, Facebook is your supplier and if you have no alternativse, your supplier has all the power.
Figure out how to be functional with out them and add them as a feature - this will keep the power with you and ensure you can provide a better / more appropriate UX for your end users.
... from someone who puts "I'm CEO bitch" on his business card? Zuckerberg is a dirtbag. It's too bad more people don't realize what they are supporting when they use facebook.
Why is facebook so immune to any antitrust violations. In some cases they are worse than microsoft.
Well, moreso because a few people made bank in the apple app store. The same reason millions of people spend money in Vegas, app development on closed ecosystems is a gambler's game.
Depending on the service, having to use Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, etc. is much more preferable than having to create a brand new account that you will most likely only use once.
Granted, from a security perspective, it isn't that great.
How not? Say I have an account with an OpenID provider (call it "Google") and I want to log in to a website that's an OpenID relying party (call it "Phil's Hobby Shop"). So I go to PhilsHobbyShop.com and click the Google button on the log-in form, and only Google sees the password I use, not some small business somewhere in flyover country. And I only have to memorize one password, which I'd be more inclined to change often than if I had to memorize a separate password for each site.
Windows applications are not "completely and utterly dependent on a service provided by someone else" if the developer makes sure to include Wine in the test matrix.
Let's use a game programming analogy. Say you're trying to extract information from a game for a console that has four tiled graphics planes. Each week, the game's program is updated through the network, and the layout of the tile textures and the map on screen and in the console's graphics memory changes subtly. So you can't just scrape the info by hardcoding addresses or tile numbers in graphics memory. Even which things are placed on each of the four graphics planes changes, as the console supports arbitrary reordering of the planes' z-order, and the game changes this as a countermeasure against scraping.
It's really handy for a social network to have an API for login purposes alone.
For login purposes alone, OpenID would work, and that's what Google, AOL, Yahoo!, and Ubuntu use. Any web site can act as a relying party to let users log in through these providers without signing a long-term agreement, unlike with Facebook and Twitter that need an API key.
I searched for Ponemon and got a mash-up of My Little Pony and Pokemon .
There are exactly two ways to do what they're doing legitimately: file bugs and hope Apple gives you an API for doing it
I'd recommend that they do so alongside whatever workarounds they're currently using. This would let the developers start each release note with "Updated our workaround for Mac OS X bugs #X, #Y, and #Z", which would at least inform the users of who is ultimately responsible for the breakage by failing to address those bugs.
No. Didn't you read the subject?