
Why Facebook Shut Down the Only Useful App it Ever Had - peter123
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Why_Facebook_Shut_Down_the_Only_Useful_App_it_Ever_Had
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Loopy
I'm with Facebook on this one, users to some degree trust that their Facebook
information isn't freely available on the web. Thats an integral part of their
business model that the communication is only with friends. As most people
find communication with friends to be more important than communication with
others on the web i believe that facebooks business model is far superior to
twitters and so there is no reason to change it.

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peter123
As far as business models are concerned, having data that is open is more
likely to lead to better web monetization like contextual ads. The ability to
have inbound links from referral sites and Google is important for ads.

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jfarmer
Facebook always errs on the side of the publisher. Their guiding principle
when it comes to user privacy is that if the publisher of some information
doesn't want it to show up, or if they change their mind, applications must
respect that preference immediately.

So, anyone who has worked in this space could've seen this coming a mile away.
Anything that indexes even potentially private information, or makes it
indexable by third parties, is inevitably going to be shut down.

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swolchok
After reading the headline, I was expecting something about the One True
Courses App (federated applications destroyed Courses, since there are too
many and no one knew which one to pick). I still miss making new connections
with people in my college courses.

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pkulak
Facebook's new feed system has more features (privacy) than RSS, and therefor
cannot be ported. It's really simple, but people still get all wound up about
it. Twitter basically _is_ RSS, so it works great.

EDIT: You could have an authenticated feed, I suppose, but that's not what
this app did.

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woodsier
I can not decide where I lay on this issue.

On one hand I love the ability to interact with facebook through apps such as
Tweekdeck (which I can only assume uses this API?).

However, this API can be abused by sites to publish 'closed' information. If I
create a strictly private profile so that all my status updates are displayed
only to my confidants, I have an expectation of privacy. Say Bob is friends
with me, however uses this API to publish all my assumedly private status
updates to the world on his website www.watch-woodsiers-status-updates.com,
without my knowing. Is that right?

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peter123
The thing is, Bob doesn't need the API to publish all your private status to
the whole world... he could already do it in plenty other ways. Same thing
with email... many of them (eg. gmail) come with RSS feeds.

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rythie
You can read RSS along with Facebook's new stream (+Twitter, Flickr etc.) in
my app, FriendBinder (<http://friendbinder.com>), I expect other apps will
follow soon.

Though I wonder if I should be worried also, even though we don't re-share the
data, they seem to be quite picky.

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makeee
But why did they need to cache data to provide this service? The script that
generates the RSS feed could have just queried the FB API and generated a feed
on every load.

