

The Facebook F8 Story No one is writing: Nothing works. - tlianza
http://lianza.org/blog/2010/04/25/the-facebook-f8-story-that-no-one-seems-to-be-writing/

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japherwocky
I spent this winter working on a pretty trivial FB app, and existing
functionalities broke all the time, usually in silent and mysterious ways.

It drove me insane that my app would be horribly broken and all I could do was
wait around spamming refresh.

Seriously awful experience, and it sounds like they're continuing the
tradition!

~~~
teej
I cannot count the Tuesday nights I spent banging my head against the wall,
just to find out that Facebook broke something again. It's one of the many
prices you pay for being a slave to The Platform.

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mikebo
Hate to say it, but this is par for the course every time Facebook releases
new APIs. They move at an insanely fast pace for a company of that size, and
there's no free lunch, so the tradeoff is buggy software.

I don't see a lot of first mover advantage with the new stuff, so my advice
would be to wait a few weeks.

~~~
jamesjyu
+1 on the insane fast pace. Their connect team is actually quite small, and
they got a bazillion things done for F8.

~~~
tlianza
I'm definitely not criticizing the developers. Developers are often pressured
to release half-baked features for the sake of a PR push on a particular date.

However, I don't believe a company should be able to enjoy massive PR
attention unless they've also delivered the product they've claimed.

As developers, we also shouldn't sell our own time short. Based on the
comments here, the low quality of this release has cost several of us some
hours/frustration hacking away on a broken platform.

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joezydeco
I don't know about any of these advanced features, but it looks like even
simple images won't load when looking at photos.

My wife has been asking me all morning if the net is down. No, it just looks
like FB is broken.

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pkulak
I spent a good portion of Friday trying to get their new JS libs working; no
dice. Even just running the three-line code examples from the docs was
throwing errors deep within the compressed JS. I had great results with the
OAuth2 API, however.

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ConceptDog
This is par for the course on a daily basis. I work on facebook apps
essentially all day, every day. One of the biggest challenges is writing an
application that relies on facebook functionality that may or may not vanish
or fail hourly.

+1 for building a business on a platform that you don't own, don't control,
and has no TOS or SLA with you that protects your uptime.

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keeganpoppen
This isn't exactly news at this point, but I was also having this problem just
today and was whining about it and here is this post. It got to the point
where I was figuring out what functions actually existed by using Chrome
developer tools and investigating the FB object and its members, and then
trying to read the minified javascript.

On the plus side, it's bound to improve soon for two reasons: 1) It can't get
any worse 2) They can't get away with this much longer

I happen to kind of know one of the guys responsible for a lot of the JS API
stuff, so I plan on giving him crap about this next time I see him, if that's
any consolation. :-)

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danicgross
I can't count the amount of times I ended up re-writing some of the API's
functions because the one's they shipped just didnt work.

~~~
riffer
right, but should we be working on their API functions?

you've moved before; gotta keep moving

ps : much respect

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tzury

      Usually this is the way most of "take over the web" revolutions appeared 
      to be after the buzz is down. 
    
      (e.g. Have you seen any interesting Google Wave plugin recently?)

~~~
zandorg
I was waiting for an RPG to come onto Google Wave as hyped, but it seemed they
all faded away.

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LiveTheDream
One peeve: an "undocumented feature" is not a feature that was advertised but
doesn't work, it's one that wasn't advertised but does work.

> The most popular site on the web is getting a pass.

Probably because the old API is still fully supported.

~~~
omaranto
> One peeve: an "undocumented feature" is not a feature that was advertised
> but doesn't work, it's one that wasn't advertised but does work.

"Documented" simply means "has documentation written for it". Being documented
or not is independent of whether a feature (1) works or (2) was advertised.

Where the author wrote "In some of the talks they admitted that although these
features are live right now, they are not yet documented (ie. you can’t use
them)", I think he meant that some features were announced, but since they are
currently undocumented they cannot be used, simply because you can't figure
out how they are used. (And they might or might not work.)

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Cornify
I had basically the same experience updating cornify.com to the new social
plug-ins. Documentation is incomplete, the Facepile doesn't work at all, and
using an older Facebook Connect library at the same time breaks everything.

This has been my experience for a long time now. Even when talking to big
clients at work, we're simply not encouraging integration with the Facebook
APIs since we can't be sure what's going to happen.

Another thing that is a big downer is that the plug-ins can't be skinned. This
may be good to keep the brand visible and establish a minimum level of design
quality, but for agencies it doesn't work since it's impossible to create
something dead-sexy.

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patio11
tlianza: check your blog, it is showing me a page of spammy pharm links. I
think your wordpress is compromised.

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gokhan
For a couple of days, new Like button stuck showing only 5 likes for my site
whereas I'm sure there are more, so I removed it.

But, implemented a Facebook login though the new graph api and it's really
nice to work with. The documentation lacks a bit but enough to integrate it to
my site in a day.

