

Facebook screws app developers on notifications - jamiemchale
http://throwww.com/a/6qb

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jkubicek
If your business model is reliant on annoying the users of a proprietary 3rd
party platform, you shouldn't be surprised when the rug gets yanked out from
underneath you.

~~~
jamiemchale
The point was that if Facebook are providing the APIs and encouraging
developers to use them then it's a crappy thing to yank the rug away.

I don't think that it's a great idea to build a business model that relies on
Facebook - but at some stages of developing an app it is very useful to use
Facebook facilities to implement a social graph and notifications, so that you
don't have to.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"I don't think that it's a great idea to build a business model that relies
> on Facebook"_

Correction: it's a bad idea to build a business model that relies on _screwing
Facebook_ , on Facebook's platform.

One of Facebook's priorities is keeping its users engaged and happy - invite-
heavy, spammy apps run directly contrary to that goal (in a very egregious,
very serious way). It is no surprise that Facebook slammed that door shut.

This is generalizable to: if you are reliant on a third party platform and
your interests are aligned _against_ the interests of the platform, you will
fail.

~~~
duaneb
> One of Facebook's priorities is keeping its users engaged and happy

Engaged, yes. Happy, bullshit. Facebook ignores its users and abuses them far
more regularly than most other companies. Anecdotally, everyone I know hates
facebook and wants an alternative that has active users. By numbers, Facebook
was the last in brand satisfaction for its market in 2011[1], although ACSI
appears to have died since then. I strongly suspect the reason facebook
restricted notifications was because they weren't making enough money to
offset e.g. disabling of notifications.

\---

[1]: [http://news.yahoo.com/acsi-facebooks-consumer-
satisfaction-s...](http://news.yahoo.com/acsi-facebooks-consumer-satisfaction-
still-lowest-social-media-045046906.html)

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purplefruit
As a facebook user, I'm happy I'm not longer gonna get "your friend has
invited you to this app..." notifications. As a developer, though, I can see
why this would be frustrating.

~~~
jamiemchale
The main frustration here is that the Requests are those that are actively
initiated by a user. A friend is actively trying to invite you to the app,
rather than just an app spamming those who have once installed it.

~~~
rhizome
I don't use FB apps, but by any chance is it common to provide rewards to
users for inviting their friends via Requests?

~~~
misnome
Yes, at least if not directly - then by making it harder to proceed without
"friends" playing the games.

Also, it's not like they have carefully selected the group of friends that
they want! The ones I have seen just have a "Send to all friends" tickbox.

~~~
makomk
It's still allowed for games, though.

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douglasp
I replied on the site, but I'll share my comment here as well.

I work on Facebook Platform. We never "turned off the Requests functionality
for apps that are not labelled as games, breaking many live apps." We never
turned off requests. We never broke a single app.

What we did do was test the impact of issuing a notification for a new app
request for several categories of apps. The sending and delivering of requests
still worked through this test and nothing broke. Users could still send
requests and they could receive them on Facebook.

The key thing to bear in mind is that our APIs often express "intent", not
specific UX actions on Facebook.com or our mobile apps. We are always testing
new user experiences to see what the best experience is for a given intent
from an app. Such was the case with this test.

Again, no apps were broken, we were simply testing if/when/how we should
surface notifications for app requests to users.

We have concluded this particular set of tests and if we are going to make
some permanent changes, we will make sure to inform our developer community.

~~~
jamiemchale
Thanks for the reply Douglas, I'd dropped you a note via FB asking for advice
on how to proceed.

It's a very frustrating position to be in. I can understand why you need to
test, and the arguments in favour of preventing spam.

It does seem that when you play by (what you think are) the rules you can get
screwed, as others take advantage of the system. It's been a very frustrating
few days!

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mattmaroon
This story is about 3 years late. Facebook long, long ago made notifications
unreliable. They just took them from near-worthless to totally worthless for
some apps.

Nobody who has any clue what they're doing is relying on those notifications
getting through en masse now, at least not without a contract with Facebook.

~~~
jen_h
Agreed; app requests' visibility and acceptance rates tend to be so abysmal in
general that I'd bet that it makes very little difference to most developers
that they've been yanked.

Meanwhile, Dr. Oz has a diet he'd like you to go on...click here to change
your life.

------
bsimpson
I don't know if this has changed recently, but when the FB Platform launched,
Facebook was notorious for constantly breaking publicly documented APIs. In
fact, an unmaintained wiki was their official documentation.

I'm surprised anybody is still surprised when Facebook changes its rules
without warning.

~~~
jamiemchale
They have a blog called "Operation Developer Love" and a 90 day breaking
changes policy - but it hasn't been followed in this case.

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jrussbowman
"So this is a warning - develop for the Facebook platform and run the risk of
your business losing its whole value over-night."

This goes for using any platform. Look at the apps developed using the Twitter
platform. This is one reason I've been trying to work on other ideas for a
business, or to do my own crawling, for unscatter.com. Using API's from
another company is always going to be a product risk.

~~~
obviouslygreen
Not only does it apply to any platform, this particular lesson keeps getting
re-learned and re-ranted regarding FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

They all present massive opportunities to reach and interact with
users/customers/clients... but unless you've been living under a rock for the
last few years, _you should know this kind of thing can and DOES happen._

This shouldn't and won't stop most people from building services on top of
these platforms, but at this point you either know this is a risk and
accept/plan for it, or you don't know this, which means you do not have an
adequate understanding of the infrastructure you are depending on.

~~~
jamiemchale
The problem that I had, and why I wrote about it, is that Facebook didn't
follow their own policy on breaking changes.

We had planned to use Facebook-only for the first phase of the app - as it has
a prebuilt social graph, friend model, and notifications system. Easy to use,
and with a large base of users.

I guess my point is that even if you think you have taken a calculated risk
(90 days breaking changes), the companies can find a way to mess up your plans
anyway!

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Irishsteve
Whats annoying about all these new fandangeled web platforms is that they
really screw third party developers over with drastic API changes which only
benefit their own interests.

This is totally different to how things used to be done back in the desktop
software era.... oh wait... oops.

P.s it sucks to be small and at the mercy of big boys

~~~
deservingend
It benefits the Facebook user, which is what they should care about.

It sucks to be small and at the mercy of app developer spam.

Maybe it's time to create real products rather than just exploit the Facebook
API to spread garbage?

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carsongross
This is why all social integrations should be as light touch as possible: keep
the value somewhere you control it.

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thurn
The documentation has always explicitly stated that notifications may or may
not be triggered by requests: <https://developers.facebook.com/docs/channels/>

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deservingend
Facebook is protecting its users from spammers aka app developers.

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niggler
I'm surprised that people still have expectations of Facebook, given what
twitter has done in the past ...

