

The reality of being a new developer on Facebook - wildbunny
http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/08/the-reality-of-being-a-new-developer-on-facebook/

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ignifero
That is an awesome writeup, wildbunny. We all suffer with facebook's
temperamental platform. There are a couple points i would add actually:

\- At this point it's impossible to maintain virality without using "game
dynamics", i.e. some sort of manipulative tricks that will persuade users to
post things to their wall. Unfortunately, this is only possible for game apps
(and is something zynga has perfected). It _IS_ still possible to maintain
virality, but you also need to complement it with advertising.

\- There are bugs in facebook's bugzilla that have been lurking for years.
Facebook tends to push buggy code at least every week,; sometimes bugs make
apps unusable for days.

\- Accidents happen more often than not. Last month, facebook removed 50000 of
our users from our game for one day.

\- Adsense is the best advertising solution, not just because the payouts are
2-5 times higher, but also because the ads are safer and more useful. Since we
switched to their "approved" advertisers, we have been receiving reports about
malware ads. Unfortunately, their nonsensical terms are designed so that only
small advertising shops would be willing to participate.

The overall experience has been good, but lately it's getting insufferable.
It's odd that facebook has chosen to monetize its platform from facebook
credits at the lowpoint of the platform. We have already put our games on
maintainance mode, and embarked on other endeavors

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wildbunny
Hi ignifero,

Glad you liked the post :) Also glad you were finding it a bit better than we
were, at least initially anyway!

We're not doing any more facebook apps for the foreseeable future either...

Cheers, Paul.

