

Facebook Cuts Off MessageMe’s Access To Its Social Graph - coloneltcb
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/facebook-messageme/

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neya
This is why you should never build a startup/app based on someone else's API
especially when that someone else doesn't take money from you. Seriously, who
would want to run a business that is completely dependent on someone else's
choices?

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newhouseb
I've often pondered whether there exists an alternate universe where Facebook
could provide a social platform at a cost much like how Amazon provides a
computing platform for money.

If you want to build a social app, especially one that works tightly with
facebook, you're going to end up building basically your own social network
that synchronizes with facebook at various points in time (for comments and
whatnot) and also performs feed fanout/distribution. If you anticipate hitting
scale, this can be tricky to engineer properly. Facebook clearly has the
framework developed for doing all of these things but since their API lacks a
real strategic purpose (other than to trick companies into a hostile
dependency with Facebook), it is under-designed and frustrating to use.

If Facebook were to offer a service where they would charge some amount of
money for an app to get an app-specific feed of friends, feed of yourself,
list of friends using an app, hosting/indexing of open graph objects (read:
just the metadata), and notifications on any activity related to your app, I
would bet companies would pay. You can do all of this today, but it's a
hodgepodge of FQL, periodical scraping, your own distribution, and gross
overreaches in privacy.

In other words, if they actually ran the Graph API like a business and not
some poorly disguised attempt at being "Open", Facebook could a) add another
revenue stream, b) increase usage/engagement on their own platform, and c)
save a lot of developers' time.

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martinkallstrom
It can't be done since it would bring the narrative of "Facebook is selling
user's data" too close to reality. With the addition of occasional leaks of
who is buying into their platform, it would provide media with a constant
stream of savoury headlines such as "Facebook is selling your personal
information to the CIA" and "Facebook is selling your your personal
information to Iran".

~~~
newhouseb
I actually think that this could be a privacy _saving_ measure instead of a
privacy leaking one, because if it was packaged as an app hosting service it
could be sandboxed much more straightforwardly. For example, today, if you
want to monitor FB comments on a user's open graph action, you have to request
notifications for every time a user's entire wall changes and then scrape
their entire wall to find out what changed.

Do I care about all the other crap that happens on a user's wall? Nope. Can I
ask for updates only on my apps activity? Nope. Thus you're stuck asking for
much more access than you actually want/need simply since the privacy is
poorly designed.

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niggler
I'm surprised facebook hasn't decided to go all the way and have a person
audit every single app that tries to access FB data.

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scottrblock
It would be kind of hard to call it an "Open Graph" if it were that closed.

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baddox
No, it would require absolutely no effort to call it an "Open Graph" if it
were that closed.

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ishansharma
Hash tags done, blocking dev access to API done... is it just me or is FB
trying to be next Twitter?

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johnpowell
Is this be a dick week? I guess they figured nobody would notice after
Google's dick-moves.

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kmfrk
It's pretty ironic that they would pull this right after this BuzzFeed article
on developers' problems with the platform:
[http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/this-is-facebooks-
midlife-...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/this-is-facebooks-midlife-
crisis).

