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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?
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?
When your entire business is totally dependent on someone else's business, you have absolutely no control.
It's like being a contract services company with only one client.
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.
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 !
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?
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 !