It's worth noting that a lot of the apps that Facebook "killed off" (iLike, Social Reader, RockYou, Zynga games, etc.) really did detract from the user experience. Let's take Washington Post's Social Reader as a case study. You had to authorize the app in order to read the articles (that were often loaded with linkbait-y titles), and any time you did read (or click on) an article it automatically shared it with all of your Facebook friends. Zynga is another example; I'm sure I wasn't the only one constantly bombarded with invites to Whateverville. I had to unfriend some people to avoid them, because there was no way to turn them off.
It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was, "You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends." Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets.
Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself, but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place.
Couldn't have said it better myself -- this is exactly what I was thinking as I read this article. I was really surprised that they spent so long lamenting the loss of spam and ugly widgets on users' profiles.
I remember when they opened it up so you could add 3rd party widgets to your profile, and that was dangerously close to myspace... just about as close as Facebook ever got. And I'm glad they didn't get any closer. The reason facebook took off against myspace was that the user experience was good and it was clean. Ruining that is just not something they could afford.
I think you really nailed it with this particular statement:
> Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm.
- 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 constantly. My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning.
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.
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/
>> - 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-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.
Revenue stream was a pretty big miss. Devs weren't offered a share of the facebook ads income for views on their apps and they had no way to fund paid apps. So 3rd parties came in to cover the gap and then Facebook didn't like it so they started banning them or trying to force their own half baked solutions.
Facebook’s inconstant behavior on Platform, however, has never been malicious. Rather, it is a result of an engineering-led culture"
Seems me and pandodaily have a different definition of "engineer". I'm not an engineer, as I don't have an engineering degree, but I do feel bad for my friends who do, are professionals, and get grouped in with the type of programmers who are just haphazardly winging it to this degree.
"has never been malicious": heh, the argument is that encouraging businesses to rely on a platform that intentionally and knowingly doesn't deliver isn't malicious because the root cause is incompetence or not caring. Not sure about that one.
<dropping knowledge> What many people don't know is that the motto never was intended to be "move fast & break things." Rather, it's "move fast and don't be afraid to break things." Slightly less bold, yes, but definitely more empowering to feel confident and not be afraid to take risks.
There's a bit of internal debate that now that the phrase has been shortened that it's used as an excuse to be sloppy for the sake of "getting shit done" (as they say at Box). Still, given that I used to work at places where mistakes were consistently held against you, I like the idealism here.
</dropping knowledge>
Except that there is an illusion of "mistakes won't be held against you" some managers are shitty, some people are viciously protective over their fiefdoms within FB and if you step on their toes you get immediate negative pushback...
> 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.
Facebook could have branched off into a few profitable models with their vast network. As you mentioned, dating would have been one avenue. Match.com may not have flashy revenue numbers but their profit margin is impressive.
They could have also been LinkedIn before LinkedIn really took off. People tried to use FB in that manner but the real value of LN is in the features they offer to businesses (recruiting, sales, etc). Again, they had this enourmous network but didn't think to add value to it.
They could have gone after Craigslist, especially in the realm of real estate where CL wants to make sure any searching is as painful as possible.
I also feel like they dropped the ball in regards to business marketing. Plenty of small businesses can't afford a real website, FB could have been a powerful platform for finding the kinds of small businesses that are buried by other sources. They know where you live, they could know what your network likes, and they could have offered cheap, professional looking pages that get the businesses close to you on board.
Their network has so much hidden potential but they've done nothing to dig it up. Use among my network is declining but not long ago it was the hub of the internet for many of my friends. They had the eyes and mindshare to get a billion people to at least try a new service. Add the power of all those connections and they could have deprecated half of the underpopulated, poorly designed, or poorly managed sites like Yelp.
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.
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.
This is ridiculous. Facebook is the de facto identity provider for a large fraction of mobile and web. If Facebook had let their platform continue in the original direction it was going, it would've choked off their core value prop (social networking) with spam.
And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too. Spotify, for instance, is only as popular as it is because of its early integration with Facebook.
Could FB have handled their platform better? Yes absolutely. The constant API changes and failures caused no end of headaches for developers and significantly reduced their platform's value. But, I think the claims in this article are ridiculous.
And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too.
Where I come from, "significant value" for a businessperson is defined as earnings (profit). I am aware (from other posts to HN) that some developers of some apps on Facebook, and some advertisers on Facebook, think Facebook is a new environment for their businesses that provides new opportunities to profit. But is that the general experience? Is the Facebook ecosystem as a whole a profitable ecosystem that allows third-party companies hosted on that ecosystem to profit, and meanwhile allows Facebook to profit?
As I have written before here on HN, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it. I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me."
My experience with building an alternative Android Facebook client (which naturally uses almost every part of the API):
1) Just keeping up with documented and undocumented breaking changes is probably a full time job.
2) Expect that some feature of the API breaks every 2 weeks, especially login on their Android SDKs cannot be relied upon.(reliable for me is the industry standard for server uptime usually advertised - 99.99999%) If your application just uses few parts of the API it probably once every 1 or 2 months.
3) Substract 0.5 to 1.0 points from the rating of your app in the Android or iOS app store, depending on how heavy you rely on Facebook, because of the instability of their APIs.
4) Expect to spend at least a day per month writing bug reports. (Or just give up like I did)
5) You will do lots of reverse engineering to work around the bugs which they are constantly creating at a mind blowing rate.
My final conclusion after almost 2 years of working with their APIs (as a good actor) for my app (link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&h...) is that I will never ever ever build again something that relies that much on Facebook.
If I need a friends list in a future project, I'll just use the users telephone book, like I already did on a VoIP/Messaging app for mobile that I built for the company I work for.
If I need private messaging I'll just set up my own XMPP server.
If I need login, I will sure as hell save myself the headache of using their fucked up (and even when it is working - bad converting) login, and build one myself!
The 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!
>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.
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.
Facebook moving the application "profile boxes" off the main profile page was really the turn-key event where it clicked that things were headed downhill. They did it because people were getting fed up with app spam, but it also demonstrated that they had zero regard for existing Platform apps that had built infrastructure around a given set of assumptions.
At that time, companies like Zynga were still in their infancy and had plenty of success runway to go, but it really marked the inflection point.
As an app dev, I saw the writing on the wall years ago... at the time of that post it looks like I had about 550k users. Ended up selling all my apps six months later at ~1.3m, chalk one up for foresight == hindsight.
Admittedly I did not make it through the whole article, but the comparison to iOS early on is laughable. The difference is A) access to a social graph of your friends and their trivial online activities vs B) a powerful touch screen computer in your pocket.
The Facebook API did not have some incredible mishandled potential. Instead, it was a very cool and forward-thinking API that had to constantly be modified to fight spam and keep up with Facebook's rapidly evolving product (which is a couple orders of magnitude more engaging now than it was in 2007 I might add).
Sure the Facebook API could have been better managed. Documentation and stability could have been better for sure. Maybe even the features could have been better. But the Facebook API is not a world changer. The Twitter API is more along the lines of a world changer, but they decided they needed to build the most profitable business possible and being plumbing was not in the cards. The Facebook API is a way to bolster the core Facebook product (which is amazing, probably the most engaging product ever created in human history short of addictive substances). This idea that if they just did right by developers it could have been so much more amazing is just a cyberpunk fantasy. The Facebook API could never be more than a reflection of a product.
Looking back on the mashup era, the future is not going to be from the goodwill of corporations to provide amazing APIs. Rather it will be open source, open protocols and open data that allow for true advancement in the state of the art.
This article fails to consider the (possibly very legitimate) reasons why Facebook backed away from this.
To me, the two biggest ones are:
1. As others have said, spammy apps hugely detracted from the experience of using Facebook.
2. I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere, but I think it's huge: Facebook apps were never allowed to serve dynamic content on people's profile pages. This significantly impaired how rich, useful, and "social" these apps could actually be.
For example, I used to work for BillMonk, which was a way of tracking social, informal debt between friends. It should have been a perfect app for Facebook. But it wasn't possible for us to serve content in our widget that would give you up-to-date information about how much you owed a friend (or they owed you). You had to "push" your updates to this content, as I recall, but it wasn't technically feasible for us to push content updates to Facebook every time there was a change to our database.
I think Facebook imposed this limitation very deliberately for a very good reason: if an app could serve dynamic content, it could also monitor how users were using Facebook. Someone could create a "stalker" app to tell you who was visiting your profile. If such a thing existing it would significantly deter people from using Facebook. You'd have to think before every click about the social implications of visiting the next page.
It's an important part of Facebook's model that you can look at whatever you want without looking like a stalker.
Facebook Platform, as conceived, was just a bad idea anyway. Zuck nailed it when he said that "today social networks are closed systems" but here's the kicker - Platform didn't really do anything to change that. They wanted people to build apps to run inside of Facebook, not to communicate with Facebook. They weren't ever tearing down the garden walls, they were asking everybody else to move into the garden with them. And most people didn't and the people who did (mostly) realized that it was a mistake.
I think they finally moved on from that a bit, but the "let's run an app inside a social network" thing was always of very limited value.
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 "All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" and I thought of it early into this piece. Any ecosystem of any interest will always have parasites within it. When you attempt to indiscriminately remove them all you almost invariably end up with something sterile and far less interesting. When I discover a weed on my lawn, my reaction isn't to burn the lawn and pave it. Sure I wouldn't have any weeds that way, but a concrete sheet is far less interesting (to me at least) than a lush lawn. So I suck it up and deal with the weeds on a case by case basis, because that is the only way to do it without torching the rest of the ecosystem that I want to maintain. It seems like Facebook, when faced with the weed problem, went the concrete sheet route, torching both the parasites and the rest of the actors that actually made up the ecosystem. Sure, it means that there are no more weeds, but it means that there also aren't any of the other organisms that create value in your ecosystem.
Another thing to consider is the energy cost of "putting down roots" so to speak in an ecosystem and evolving with changes. An organism has to spend energy to establish itself within an ecosystem, and it also has to spend energy changing itself to adapt to changes in the environment. Every joule of energy it spends doing this is a joule it doesn't spend enriching the ecosystem it is a part of. Going back to my lawn, I don't change the soil composition every year, and I also don't pull up the grass and set it back down to resod every 6 weeks. Eventually it would die, because I would be forcing it to spend all of its energy adapting to changes I introduce rather than helping the ecosystem thrive. And then I'm back to my barren field problem.
I don't have a good ecosystem analogy for competing against their developers, but I will note that it can be framed in energy terms again. Any other organism, after watchers other repeatedly expend their energy in a particular ecosystem only to be crushed will likely decide against attempting to establish themselves in your ecosystem and instead choose one of several other competing ecosystems, even those that appear initially less attractive, because what is the use if you likely end up failing anyway?
So, my takeaway given only my shallow knowledge of what happened based on this article is that other organizations attempting to establish an ecosystem (and that is really what they want when they say platform) and reap the numerous benefits that an ecosystem can produce should spend some time thinking about how ecosystems become established and thrive in the real world before charging clumsily forward with their own naive attempts.
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.
The cost of parasites was too high for facebook, when weighted against the opportunities: facebook is all about being flat and appealing to the general public, complexities like possible scams are putting off too many potential users.
Facebook could not have grown to its present size if it had not killed the platform.
Also they can't share the social graph; the monopoly on the data that they have gathered on us is the whole point/worth/wealth of the company.
If facebook or google run into financial problems (this might happen if tax loopholes are closed, and countries decide that even big companies have to pay real corporate taxes) then these companies will be bailed out as they are 'too big to fail'.
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.
Same with Verge. A lot of sites are following Business Insider and Mashable down the high-volume shit-chute because that's how you make money when people won't pay for stuff.
My problem with facebook; it's a reminder of how much
our current society bothers me. At first is was cute--
kind of, but as the time went on it just got nauseating.
The narcissism
The birthdays
The baby picture--animals fine, but enough with your spawn.
The touching quotes
The pictures of what you ate.
The head tilted portrait.
The reminder that people don't change.
Actually, the only facebook posts I can stomach are from the
Amish--sad, but true.
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.
For all this article's many faults, at least it is long-form and has more than two sources. I hope PandoDaily continues to support long-form journalism and I hope they inspire other tech blogs to do the same.
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.
[+] [-] austenallred|12 years ago|reply
It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was, "You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends." Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets.
Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself, but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place.
[+] [-] jenius|12 years ago|reply
I remember when they opened it up so you could add 3rd party widgets to your profile, and that was dangerously close to myspace... just about as close as Facebook ever got. And I'm glad they didn't get any closer. The reason facebook took off against myspace was that the user experience was good and it was clean. Ruining that is just not something they could afford.
I think you really nailed it with this particular statement:
> Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm.
[+] [-] 6ren|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|12 years ago|reply
- 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 constantly. My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning.
All of these were pretty foreseeable.
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|12 years ago|reply
Apps aside, the proportion of basic wall pageloads that hang due to, I'm assuming, some javascript complexity approaches 100%.
[+] [-] Eduard|12 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] prostoalex|12 years ago|reply
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-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.
[+] [-] johnward|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prometheuspk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freshhawk|12 years ago|reply
Seems me and pandodaily have a different definition of "engineer". I'm not an engineer, as I don't have an engineering degree, but I do feel bad for my friends who do, are professionals, and get grouped in with the type of programmers who are just haphazardly winging it to this degree.
"has never been malicious": heh, the argument is that encouraging businesses to rely on a platform that intentionally and knowingly doesn't deliver isn't malicious because the root cause is incompetence or not caring. Not sure about that one.
[+] [-] dmpk2k|12 years ago|reply
Hear, hear. That comparison was insulting.
That's like calling a child playing cowboy with a plastic gun a member of the SAS; it really puts down all the hard work and skill of professionals.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] s3r3nity|12 years ago|reply
There's a bit of internal debate that now that the phrase has been shortened that it's used as an excuse to be sloppy for the sake of "getting shit done" (as they say at Box). Still, given that I used to work at places where mistakes were consistently held against you, I like the idealism here. </dropping knowledge>
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|12 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] CBC440|12 years ago|reply
They could have also been LinkedIn before LinkedIn really took off. People tried to use FB in that manner but the real value of LN is in the features they offer to businesses (recruiting, sales, etc). Again, they had this enourmous network but didn't think to add value to it.
They could have gone after Craigslist, especially in the realm of real estate where CL wants to make sure any searching is as painful as possible.
I also feel like they dropped the ball in regards to business marketing. Plenty of small businesses can't afford a real website, FB could have been a powerful platform for finding the kinds of small businesses that are buried by other sources. They know where you live, they could know what your network likes, and they could have offered cheap, professional looking pages that get the businesses close to you on board.
Their network has so much hidden potential but they've done nothing to dig it up. Use among my network is declining but not long ago it was the hub of the internet for many of my friends. They had the eyes and mindshare to get a billion people to at least try a new service. Add the power of all those connections and they could have deprecated half of the underpopulated, poorly designed, or poorly managed sites like Yelp.
[+] [-] tibbon|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
The NSA would like to disagree....
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|12 years ago|reply
And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too. Spotify, for instance, is only as popular as it is because of its early integration with Facebook.
Could FB have handled their platform better? Yes absolutely. The constant API changes and failures caused no end of headaches for developers and significantly reduced their platform's value. But, I think the claims in this article are ridiculous.
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
Where I come from, "significant value" for a businessperson is defined as earnings (profit). I am aware (from other posts to HN) that some developers of some apps on Facebook, and some advertisers on Facebook, think Facebook is a new environment for their businesses that provides new opportunities to profit. But is that the general experience? Is the Facebook ecosystem as a whole a profitable ecosystem that allows third-party companies hosted on that ecosystem to profit, and meanwhile allows Facebook to profit?
As I have written before here on HN, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it. I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me."
[+] [-] DominikR|12 years ago|reply
1) Just keeping up with documented and undocumented breaking changes is probably a full time job.
2) Expect that some feature of the API breaks every 2 weeks, especially login on their Android SDKs cannot be relied upon.(reliable for me is the industry standard for server uptime usually advertised - 99.99999%) If your application just uses few parts of the API it probably once every 1 or 2 months.
3) Substract 0.5 to 1.0 points from the rating of your app in the Android or iOS app store, depending on how heavy you rely on Facebook, because of the instability of their APIs.
4) Expect to spend at least a day per month writing bug reports. (Or just give up like I did)
5) You will do lots of reverse engineering to work around the bugs which they are constantly creating at a mind blowing rate.
My final conclusion after almost 2 years of working with their APIs (as a good actor) for my app (link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&h...) is that I will never ever ever build again something that relies that much on Facebook.
If I need a friends list in a future project, I'll just use the users telephone book, like I already did on a VoIP/Messaging app for mobile that I built for the company I work for.
If I need private messaging I'll just set up my own XMPP server.
If I need login, I will sure as hell save myself the headache of using their fucked up (and even when it is working - bad converting) login, and build one myself!
[+] [-] zachallia|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|12 years ago|reply
I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".
[+] [-] macspoofing|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fizzbar|12 years ago|reply
Reality did not agree.
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirse|12 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82706
Facebook moving the application "profile boxes" off the main profile page was really the turn-key event where it clicked that things were headed downhill. They did it because people were getting fed up with app spam, but it also demonstrated that they had zero regard for existing Platform apps that had built infrastructure around a given set of assumptions.
At that time, companies like Zynga were still in their infancy and had plenty of success runway to go, but it really marked the inflection point.
As an app dev, I saw the writing on the wall years ago... at the time of that post it looks like I had about 550k users. Ended up selling all my apps six months later at ~1.3m, chalk one up for foresight == hindsight.
[+] [-] dasil003|12 years ago|reply
The Facebook API did not have some incredible mishandled potential. Instead, it was a very cool and forward-thinking API that had to constantly be modified to fight spam and keep up with Facebook's rapidly evolving product (which is a couple orders of magnitude more engaging now than it was in 2007 I might add).
Sure the Facebook API could have been better managed. Documentation and stability could have been better for sure. Maybe even the features could have been better. But the Facebook API is not a world changer. The Twitter API is more along the lines of a world changer, but they decided they needed to build the most profitable business possible and being plumbing was not in the cards. The Facebook API is a way to bolster the core Facebook product (which is amazing, probably the most engaging product ever created in human history short of addictive substances). This idea that if they just did right by developers it could have been so much more amazing is just a cyberpunk fantasy. The Facebook API could never be more than a reflection of a product.
Looking back on the mashup era, the future is not going to be from the goodwill of corporations to provide amazing APIs. Rather it will be open source, open protocols and open data that allow for true advancement in the state of the art.
[+] [-] haberman|12 years ago|reply
To me, the two biggest ones are:
1. As others have said, spammy apps hugely detracted from the experience of using Facebook.
2. I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere, but I think it's huge: Facebook apps were never allowed to serve dynamic content on people's profile pages. This significantly impaired how rich, useful, and "social" these apps could actually be.
For example, I used to work for BillMonk, which was a way of tracking social, informal debt between friends. It should have been a perfect app for Facebook. But it wasn't possible for us to serve content in our widget that would give you up-to-date information about how much you owed a friend (or they owed you). You had to "push" your updates to this content, as I recall, but it wasn't technically feasible for us to push content updates to Facebook every time there was a change to our database.
I think Facebook imposed this limitation very deliberately for a very good reason: if an app could serve dynamic content, it could also monitor how users were using Facebook. Someone could create a "stalker" app to tell you who was visiting your profile. If such a thing existing it would significantly deter people from using Facebook. You'd have to think before every click about the social implications of visiting the next page.
It's an important part of Facebook's model that you can look at whatever you want without looking like a stalker.
[+] [-] mindcrime|12 years ago|reply
I think they finally moved on from that a bit, but the "let's run an app inside a social network" thing was always of very limited value.
[+] [-] jgon|12 years ago|reply
I think that my favorite piece of writing by Cory Doctorow is his essay "All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" and I thought of it early into this piece. Any ecosystem of any interest will always have parasites within it. When you attempt to indiscriminately remove them all you almost invariably end up with something sterile and far less interesting. When I discover a weed on my lawn, my reaction isn't to burn the lawn and pave it. Sure I wouldn't have any weeds that way, but a concrete sheet is far less interesting (to me at least) than a lush lawn. So I suck it up and deal with the weeds on a case by case basis, because that is the only way to do it without torching the rest of the ecosystem that I want to maintain. It seems like Facebook, when faced with the weed problem, went the concrete sheet route, torching both the parasites and the rest of the actors that actually made up the ecosystem. Sure, it means that there are no more weeds, but it means that there also aren't any of the other organisms that create value in your ecosystem.
Another thing to consider is the energy cost of "putting down roots" so to speak in an ecosystem and evolving with changes. An organism has to spend energy to establish itself within an ecosystem, and it also has to spend energy changing itself to adapt to changes in the environment. Every joule of energy it spends doing this is a joule it doesn't spend enriching the ecosystem it is a part of. Going back to my lawn, I don't change the soil composition every year, and I also don't pull up the grass and set it back down to resod every 6 weeks. Eventually it would die, because I would be forcing it to spend all of its energy adapting to changes I introduce rather than helping the ecosystem thrive. And then I'm back to my barren field problem.
I don't have a good ecosystem analogy for competing against their developers, but I will note that it can be framed in energy terms again. Any other organism, after watchers other repeatedly expend their energy in a particular ecosystem only to be crushed will likely decide against attempting to establish themselves in your ecosystem and instead choose one of several other competing ecosystems, even those that appear initially less attractive, because what is the use if you likely end up failing anyway?
So, my takeaway given only my shallow knowledge of what happened based on this article is that other organizations attempting to establish an ecosystem (and that is really what they want when they say platform) and reap the numerous benefits that an ecosystem can produce should spend some time thinking about how ecosystems become established and thrive in the real world before charging clumsily forward with their own naive attempts.
[+] [-] aboodman|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|12 years ago|reply
Also they can't share the social graph; the monopoly on the data that they have gathered on us is the whole point/worth/wealth of the company.
If facebook or google run into financial problems (this might happen if tax loopholes are closed, and countries decide that even big companies have to pay real corporate taxes) then these companies will be bailed out as they are 'too big to fail'.
[+] [-] sidcool|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scholia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dano414|12 years ago|reply
Actually, the only facebook posts I can stomach are from the Amish--sad, but true.
[+] [-] jeena|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] killermonkeys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steven2012|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnaritas|12 years ago|reply