

The Dangers of Relying on Facebook - bbd37
http://blog.pixamid.com/post/4773404191/the-dangers-of-relying-on-facebook

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dansingerman
As a business, it will always be a bad idea to completely rely on another
entity outside your control, whose interests are very likely to be misaligned
to yours.

By all means leverage, Facebook (and Twitter and others) sign on and APIs, but
if you are building a business on a single one of those, you are completely at
the mercy of their whims, any incompetency, and changes in business practices.

~~~
aaronmarks
This seems like a really valid and important point. Yet companies who do build
their entire business on other companies' info / APIS (Think Greplin, Trendrr,
Tweetdeck, etc.) still get tons of interest from investors. While it is easy
to realize the importance of developing an independent business when
commenting on HN, I think the startup community as a whole needs to start
displaying this in its actions.

Once more large internet companies realize that their users (both of their
services and API) are not necessarily their customers (Think Twitter's denial
of new 3rd party clients), the API free-for-all which we're experiencing right
now will dry up, and we'll see at least one of the companies-who-are-built-on-
other-companies fail. This might be the kick in the pants that the startup
community needs to realize the importance of building unique, independent
businesses.

~~~
neutronicus
Greplin et al always have the exit scenario where their product is so much
better than whatever (say) Facebook has in-house that Facebook buys them as a
social-search talent-acquisition play.

This sort of scenario might be easier to identify and invest in than "the next
Facebook".

~~~
joe_the_user
Wouldn't it be a bit worrisome for a company to bargain to be purchased by
Facebook when that company is in the position that Facebook could put them out
of business at any point by cloning their stuff?

Creating an app as a "talent-acquisition play" seems reasonable but wouldn't
you want to position yourself for multiple offers? If Facebook buying for
talent, it doesn't have to restrict itself to the creators of Facebook apps.

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chrislomax
I would honestly never rely solely on one system, unless that system was my
own. You never know what might happen in a years time. Everyone might realise
that Facebook is actually worth £10 and it just drops out the sky altogehter.

One of the developers here was building a newsletter system recently and they
wanted to use just one 3rd party mail system to manage the user lists and
groups etc. I stressed that we must make the system independent and to store
the lists of users and groups ourselves and only replicate to the email
marketing system. That way, if we ever fell out with the email marketing
software we could just open a relationship with another company and replicate
the same information there.

As a company, we never implement something without sitting down and talking
about the pro's and con's first. Don't get me wrong, we don't have meetings
for the sake of meetings but important matters we take the time to discuss.

When we planned our CMS, we took 2 weeks to plan the system and how it would
work. We are 18 months into the development cycle and the only thing we can
think of that we would do differently is to use url routing over our own url
engine. It's not even a massive change to implemement so we are lucky. The 2
weeks planning has saved months of re-factoring for future.

We now have news, galleries, ecommerce, content driven pages, personalised url
campaigns, newsletters, e-newsletters. The list goes on. All with no regrets!

It's unfortunate that a company has to suffer bad planning and bad decisions,
the main thing is learning from them

~~~
rmc
You have to trust someone. Unless you're using multiple datacentres, you are
trusting your datacentre/hosting provider. All it takes is one billing dispute
before they turn you off.

Re: mailing list, the great thing about email (unlike facebook), is you can
change how you send you emails and your end user can still get your emails,
and they don't know you've changed. Whereas with Facebook, you can't just
change to (say) Diaspora without affecting your users.

~~~
chrislomax
I appreciate what you are saying but I know that if I pay my bills and I
handle my own redundancy I am only responsible for myself. The level of
dependency you are referring to would get you stuck in a recursive loop of
never trusting anyone!

What I am saying is, if this company had stored the pics on their own server
then they could still retrieve the pictures. You would then push the pictures
to Facebook, Diaspora, Twitter etc. The company were using the data storing
capabilities in Facebook to store the pictures, hence the high dependency on
Facebook.

If in the instance I mentioned, Facebook cancel the app, you would still have
the pics on your server and the user could see them and post them elsewhere

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revetkn
Facebook API client author here (<http://restfb.com>). In my experience,
you've got to be extremely careful/defensive when relying on anything from FB.
Undocumented breaking changes are commonplace and no one on the FB side seems
to care very much, possibly because they've got a de facto monopoly for the
time being, or possibly because community notifications/documentation/etc. are
boring next to sexy engineering problems.

Parroting the article, I know: unless your entire app is Facebook-centric, be
careful of tightly locking it to FB. If you must tie yourself to FB, think
long and hard about doing so first and if you proceed make sure you've got a
mitigation plan in place if things go south.

~~~
dtby
_possibly because they've got a de facto monopoly for the time being_

On what?

~~~
revetkn
Like quanticle said, social networking. You can't say, "fuck this, I'll just
integrate with myspace instead" without getting laughed out of the room. Like
it or not, Facebook's the only game in town.

~~~
dtby
_Like quanticle said, social networking._

My problem is that is not a real thing which can be monopolized. I promise I'm
not being (intentionally) obtuse here. I don't understand which piece of an
online offering requires Facebook. Maybe an example would help me.

~~~
kwantam
Specifically with respect to the OP, they have a gigantic datastore of their
users' social graphs. That's a "real thing" that can be monopolized: their
users' data.

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jaysonelliot
It seems that neither Apple nor Facebook is particularly attentive to the
developers who build on their platforms once the app is released. Curious
models for companies whose success is largely due to the developer community.

~~~
quanticle
I don't know about Apple, but I don't think that Facebook's success is due to
the developer community. I would argue that the arrow of causation is reversed
in Facebook's case - developers are interested in Facebook because of its
market share, rather than the reverse.

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ajhai
I'm working on a side project which needs to access a large sample of images
to do some magic with the provided target image. Since Facebook has a good
store of images, I'd chosen to use Facebook login (and to access user photos
and profile pictures of his friends).

With the increasing reports of Facebook horror stories, I'm redoing the
backend to be generic so that I could easily integrate a new login system
(twitter or my own) if something goes wrong.

As per my project requirements, Facebook is the best option. So, the only care
I'm taking to avoid get flagged by Facebook spam detection algos is to ask for
as less permissions as possible from the user and avoid posting on walls
without user confirmation.

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code_duck
This is pretty much my experience of basing a business on another company in
such a way. Besides having learned my lesson about that, it's left me leary of
everything from using cloud-style servers to outsourcing features such as
comments.

You can get a big boost up from leveraging another company's assets, but
you're left in a very vulnerable position - at their mercy in several ways.
I'm striving to make all future endeavors as independent as possible.

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contextfree
One way to think of this is that if you are a regular employee of a company,
you are 100% dependent on them for your work, but you also have a lot of
things taken care of for you (one hopes). If you have a startup, but it's
heavily dependent on some platform, you are maybe not completely dependent on
them in the same way, but less independent than if you had your own
infrastructure. There's sort of a continuum here.

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alttab
What does Pixamid do that the iphone/facebook android app with integrated
camera doesn't do? From what I've deduced Pixamid is a feature of current
Facebook clients, not an independent venture in its own right.

This puts them in a similar position as Foursquare or Gowalla - once Facebook
introduced places, you saw the stickers on the outside of businesses become
"Check-In with Facebook".

~~~
bbd37
Pixamid is similar to Color, in that we instantly share photos with those
around you. But Pixamid gives the user more control, allowing them to limit
sharing to just friends at the same place.

We also focus on aggregating photos from whatever source we can. Today, when
people are together socially and taking photos, those photos end up spread out
all over. If a Pixamid user is at a particular place, Pixamid will collect any
photos taken at the same place from Pixamid, Foursquare, Facebook and
Instagram.

The more nuanced sharing model and the aggregation are not currently features
of Facebook clients. From what we have learned, a lot of people are not happy
with any existing photo sharing solution, and we hope to provide some of them
with a better service.

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frankydp
Can anyone reference some community that was destroyed or is being destroyed
by the quote

"Deactivating apps without warning, and with no recourse, will seriously
hinder Facebook’s ecosystem growth amongst “real developers,” leaving just the
scammers and spammers. " Is adwords and adsense in this same trend? Does the
need for spam and scam control outway the cost?

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JGuo
The pixamid situation is similar to the reason the breakup notifier got banned
by Facebook originally. A large amount of users were deleting wall posts made
by the app, causing the app to get flagged and automatically shutdown
temporarily.

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zguy
Yep, you should just read the TOS and be prepared for the worst ;)

I'm trying to reduce my dependencies to a bare minimum. I implement most of
the features I need by myself. I need the users, just it.

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poundy
Well, it is increasingly becoming a world where we rely on 3rd party servers
like Facebook, app approval process from Apple, etc. I wonder how much more
complex things are going to get in future

