
The sad story of Facebook Platform - rpsubhub
http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/23/move-fast-break-things-the-sad-story-of-platform-facebooks-gigantic-missed-opportunity/
======
austenallred
It's worth noting that a lot of the apps that Facebook "killed off" (iLike,
Social Reader, RockYou, Zynga games, etc.) really did detract from the user
experience. Let's take Washington Post's _Social Reader_ as a case study. You
had to authorize the app in order to read the articles (that were often loaded
with linkbait-y titles), and any time you _did_ read (or click on) an article
it automatically shared it with all of your Facebook friends. Zynga is another
example; I'm sure I wasn't the only one constantly bombarded with invites to
Whateverville. I had to unfriend some people to avoid them, because there was
no way to turn them off.

It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the
platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly
designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was,
"You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends."
Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like
a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself
turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets.

Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself,
but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place.

~~~
jenius
Couldn't have said it better myself -- this is exactly what I was thinking as
I read this article. I was really surprised that they spent so long lamenting
the loss of spam and ugly widgets on users' profiles.

I remember when they opened it up so you could add 3rd party widgets to your
profile, and that was dangerously close to myspace... just about as close as
Facebook ever got. And I'm glad they didn't get any closer. The reason
facebook took off against myspace was that the user experience was good and it
was clean. Ruining that is just not something they could afford.

I think you really nailed it with this particular statement:

> Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works
> like a charm.

------
mratzloff
Facebook made three clear mistakes:

\- Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with
iOS. This is so stupid.

\- Not creating clear and consistent access rules around the social graph and
notifications, with the ability to throttle down (but not altogether remove)
access for offenders. They could even automate the throttling based on user
feedback (in the form of clicks).

\- Breaking things _constantly_. My brief, frustrating experience maintaining
a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as
Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning.

All of these were pretty foreseeable.

~~~
Eduard
_My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted
of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed
things without warning._

When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some
time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook
App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly:
[https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change-
policy/](https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change-policy/)

~~~
ripter
How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking
changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to
profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores

Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even
follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

~~~
rmc
Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous
comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."

~~~
return0
It's odd that they chose stackoverflow for their support system, because most
of the answered questions there are way obsolete by now.

~~~
wwweston
They chose StackOverflow for their support system _at one point_.

At one point, they've also chosen a web forum, a wiki lots of devs bought into
(but which they later _entirely blew away_ and replaced with Bing searches of
their site), and probably a half-dozen attempts at official on-site docs.

When I saw they'd offloaded to StackOverflow, I thought that was an idea that
had some promise, but the big question in my mind was how long until it
reached the critical mass where it would consist of more out-of-date answers
than current ones. And what they'd do when it does.

The answer, of course, is likely move fast and break something, and heaven
help the people who had the idea of building something on top of their
quicksand.

~~~
rmc
_a wiki lots of devs bought into (but which they later entirely blew away and
replaced with Bing searches of their site)_

They seemed to have fixed it now, but for a while the search box would return
results from the wiki, which had been removed, leading you on an endless
tempting "the answer you want is just around the corner" unhelpful drugery.

------
freshhawk
Facebook’s inconstant behavior on Platform, however, has never been malicious.
Rather, it is a result of an engineering-led culture"

Seems me and pandodaily have a different definition of "engineer". I'm not an
engineer, as I don't have an engineering degree, but I do feel bad for my
friends who do, are professionals, and get grouped in with the type of
programmers who are just haphazardly winging it to this degree.

"has never been malicious": heh, the argument is that encouraging businesses
to rely on a platform that intentionally and knowingly doesn't deliver isn't
malicious because the root cause is incompetence or not caring. Not sure about
that one.

~~~
dmpk2k
_Seems me and pandodaily have a different definition of "engineer"_

Hear, hear. That comparison was insulting.

That's like calling a child playing cowboy with a plastic gun a member of the
SAS; it really puts down all the hard work and skill of professionals.

------
s3r3nity
<dropping knowledge> What many people don't know is that the motto never was
intended to be "move fast & break things." Rather, it's "move fast and don't
be afraid to break things." Slightly less bold, yes, but definitely more
empowering to feel confident and not be afraid to take risks.

There's a bit of internal debate that now that the phrase has been shortened
that it's used as an excuse to be sloppy for the sake of "getting shit done"
(as they say at Box). Still, given that I used to work at places where
mistakes were consistently held against you, I like the idealism here.
</dropping knowledge>

~~~
samstave
Except that there is an illusion of "mistakes won't be held against you" some
managers are shitty, some people are viciously protective over their fiefdoms
within FB and if you step on their toes you get immediate negative pushback...

------
callmeed
Here is the money line (IMO):

 _> Outside of games, there has been no killer Facebook app._

Given the current policies, I'm not sure what killer app _could_ exist other
than maybe dating.

I've done a lot of fiddling and prototyping on the Facebook platform and API
(albeit mostly on the business/page side). With every-changing policies and
API specs, no startup founder should consider anything more than Facebook
"features"–never anything your business model hinges on.

~~~
CBC440
Facebook could have branched off into a few profitable models with their vast
network. As you mentioned, dating would have been one avenue. Match.com may
not have flashy revenue numbers but their profit margin is impressive.

They could have also been LinkedIn before LinkedIn really took off. People
tried to use FB in that manner but the real value of LN is in the features
they offer to businesses (recruiting, sales, etc). Again, they had this
enourmous network but didn't think to add value to it.

They could have gone after Craigslist, especially in the realm of real estate
where CL wants to make sure any searching is as painful as possible.

I also feel like they dropped the ball in regards to business marketing.
Plenty of small businesses can't afford a real website, FB could have been a
powerful platform for finding the kinds of small businesses that are buried by
other sources. They know where you live, they could know what your network
likes, and they could have offered cheap, professional looking pages that get
the businesses close to you on board.

Their network has so much hidden potential but they've done nothing to dig it
up. Use among my network is declining but not long ago it was the hub of the
internet for many of my friends. They had the eyes and mindshare to get a
billion people to at least try a new service. Add the power of all those
connections and they could have deprecated half of the underpopulated, poorly
designed, or poorly managed sites like Yelp.

------
aaronbrethorst
This is ridiculous. Facebook is the de facto identity provider for a large
fraction of mobile and web. If Facebook had let their platform continue in the
original direction it was going, it would've choked off their core value prop
(social networking) with spam.

And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too.
Spotify, for instance, is only as popular as it is because of its early
integration with Facebook.

Could FB have handled their platform better? Yes absolutely. The constant API
changes and failures caused no end of headaches for developers and
significantly reduced their platform's value. But, I think the claims in this
article are ridiculous.

~~~
tokenadult
_And the Facebook Platform has provided significant value for non-games, too._

Where I come from, "significant value" for a businessperson is defined as
earnings (profit). I am aware (from other posts to HN) that some developers of
some apps on Facebook, and some advertisers on Facebook, think Facebook is a
new environment for their businesses that provides new opportunities to
profit. But is that the general experience? Is the Facebook ecosystem as a
whole a profitable ecosystem that allows third-party companies hosted on that
ecosystem to profit, and meanwhile allows Facebook to profit?

As I have written before here on HN, "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still
being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example
of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding
it. I used to see friends on AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL
monetize just because of that. Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now,
Facebook is a very convenient network, and I like it. I do not predict that
Facebook will make a lot of money because of users like me."

------
DominikR
My experience with building an alternative Android Facebook client (which
naturally uses almost every part of the API):

1) Just keeping up with documented and undocumented breaking changes is
probably a full time job.

2) Expect that some feature of the API breaks every 2 weeks, especially login
on their Android SDKs cannot be relied upon.(reliable for me is the industry
standard for server uptime usually advertised - 99.99999%) If your application
just uses few parts of the API it probably once every 1 or 2 months.

3) Substract 0.5 to 1.0 points from the rating of your app in the Android or
iOS app store, depending on how heavy you rely on Facebook, because of the
instability of their APIs.

4) Expect to spend at least a day per month writing bug reports. (Or just give
up like I did)

5) You will do lots of reverse engineering to work around the bugs which they
are constantly creating at a mind blowing rate.

My final conclusion after almost 2 years of working with their APIs (as a good
actor) for my app (link:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&h...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster&hl=en))
is that I will never ever ever build again something that relies that much on
Facebook.

If I need a friends list in a future project, I'll just use the users
telephone book, like I already did on a VoIP/Messaging app for mobile that I
built for the company I work for.

If I need private messaging I'll just set up my own XMPP server.

If I need login, I will sure as hell save myself the headache of using their
fucked up (and even when it is working - bad converting) login, and build one
myself!

------
zachallia
The two most painful patterns over the course of Platforms early life were:

1\. The lack of timely bug fixes and the lack of internal Facebook developer
contact with external developers. The only consistent employee at Facebook in
the IRC channel was Joel Seligstein. I also actually directly heard one of the
Platform PMs say that she thought "triage" meant high priority. They did hold
events but that was more a social gathering than anything.

2\. The ridiculous lack of spam control and enforcement of policies on the
large developers. It's easy to see why people started disliking apps looking
back at how much time users had to spend sifting through spam notifications!

------
at-fates-hands
“We’ve designed Facebook Platform so that applications from third-party
developers are on a level playing field with applications built by Facebook"

I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this
platform be a "level playing field".

~~~
macspoofing
>I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this
platform be a "level playing field".

I don't blame people who would think that back in 2007. This was a new way to
build and deploy applications. It could very well have worked out great (e.g.
Amazon for example, has been largely successful in building an e-commerce
platform for third party vendors that also compete with them. Not to mention
competitors (e.g. Netflix) using AWS). Having said that, after developers were
burned by Facebook, Twitter and Google, I don't think anyone should trust
social-cloud platforms enough to base their entire business on them.

~~~
samstave
Amazon has a lot smarter people working for them on a far more complex
product.

------
jgrahamc
Back in 2007... [http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/my-email-to-mark-zuckerberg-
abou...](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/my-email-to-mark-zuckerberg-about.html)

~~~
kirse
I posted a "Future of Facebook" question to HN many days ago... funny to look
back on it now.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82706)

Facebook moving the application "profile boxes" off the main profile page was
really the turn-key event where it clicked that things were headed downhill.
They did it because people were getting fed up with app spam, but it also
demonstrated that they had zero regard for existing Platform apps that had
built infrastructure around a given set of assumptions.

At that time, companies like Zynga were still in their infancy and had plenty
of success runway to go, but it really marked the inflection point.

As an app dev, I saw the writing on the wall years ago... at the time of that
post it looks like I had about 550k users. Ended up selling all my apps six
months later at ~1.3m, chalk one up for foresight == hindsight.

------
dasil003
Admittedly I did not make it through the whole article, but the comparison to
iOS early on is laughable. The difference is A) access to a social graph of
your friends and their trivial online activities vs B) a powerful touch screen
computer in your pocket.

The Facebook API did not have some incredible mishandled potential. Instead,
it was a very cool and forward-thinking API that had to constantly be modified
to fight spam and keep up with Facebook's rapidly evolving product (which is a
couple orders of magnitude more engaging now than it was in 2007 I might add).

Sure the Facebook API could have been better managed. Documentation and
stability could have been better for sure. Maybe even the features could have
been better. But the Facebook API is not a world changer. The Twitter API is
more along the lines of a world changer, but they decided they needed to build
the most profitable business possible and being plumbing was not in the cards.
The Facebook API is a way to bolster the core Facebook product (which is
amazing, probably the most engaging product ever created in human history
short of addictive substances). This idea that if they just did right by
developers it could have been so much more amazing is just a cyberpunk
fantasy. The Facebook API could never be more than a reflection of a product.

Looking back on the mashup era, the future is not going to be from the
goodwill of corporations to provide amazing APIs. Rather it will be open
source, open protocols and open data that allow for true advancement in the
state of the art.

------
haberman
This article fails to consider the (possibly very legitimate) reasons why
Facebook backed away from this.

To me, the two biggest ones are:

1\. As others have said, spammy apps hugely detracted from the experience of
using Facebook.

2\. I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere, but I think it's huge: Facebook
apps were never allowed to serve dynamic content on people's profile pages.
This significantly impaired how rich, useful, and "social" these apps could
actually be.

For example, I used to work for BillMonk, which was a way of tracking social,
informal debt between friends. It should have been a perfect app for Facebook.
But it wasn't possible for us to serve content in our widget that would give
you up-to-date information about how much you owed a friend (or they owed
you). You had to "push" your updates to this content, as I recall, but it
wasn't technically feasible for us to push content updates to Facebook every
time there was a change to our database.

I think Facebook imposed this limitation very deliberately for a very good
reason: if an app could serve dynamic content, it could also monitor how users
were using Facebook. Someone could create a "stalker" app to tell you who was
visiting your profile. If such a thing existing it would significantly deter
people from using Facebook. You'd have to think before every click about the
social implications of visiting the next page.

It's an important part of Facebook's model that you can look at whatever you
want without looking like a stalker.

------
mindcrime
Facebook Platform, as conceived, was just a bad idea anyway. Zuck nailed it
when he said that "today social networks are closed systems" but here's the
kicker - Platform didn't really do anything to change that. They wanted people
to build apps to run _inside of_ Facebook, not to communicate _with_ Facebook.
They weren't ever tearing down the garden walls, they were asking everybody
else to move into the garden with them. And most people didn't and the people
who did (mostly) realized that it was a mistake.

I think they finally moved on from that a bit, but the "let's run an app
inside a social network" thing was always of very limited value.

------
jgon
Reading this article the one idea that persisted in my head was that this was
a case of people not really knowing anything about ecology trying to create an
ecosystem. Sure they used the word "Platform" and maybe that was actually the
first clue, but what they really wanted was an ecosystem of actors creating
increased value for their domain.

I think that my favorite piece of writing by Cory Doctorow is his essay "All
Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" and I thought of it early into this piece.
Any ecosystem of any interest will always have parasites within it. When you
attempt to indiscriminately remove them all you almost invariably end up with
something sterile and far less interesting. When I discover a weed on my lawn,
my reaction isn't to burn the lawn and pave it. Sure I wouldn't have any weeds
that way, but a concrete sheet is far less interesting (to me at least) than a
lush lawn. So I suck it up and deal with the weeds on a case by case basis,
because that is the only way to do it without torching the rest of the
ecosystem that I want to maintain. It seems like Facebook, when faced with the
weed problem, went the concrete sheet route, torching both the parasites and
the rest of the actors that actually made up the ecosystem. Sure, it means
that there are no more weeds, but it means that there also aren't any of the
other organisms that create value in your ecosystem.

Another thing to consider is the energy cost of "putting down roots" so to
speak in an ecosystem and evolving with changes. An organism has to spend
energy to establish itself within an ecosystem, and it also has to spend
energy changing itself to adapt to changes in the environment. Every joule of
energy it spends doing this is a joule it doesn't spend enriching the
ecosystem it is a part of. Going back to my lawn, I don't change the soil
composition every year, and I also don't pull up the grass and set it back
down to resod every 6 weeks. Eventually it would die, because I would be
forcing it to spend all of its energy adapting to changes I introduce rather
than helping the ecosystem thrive. And then I'm back to my barren field
problem.

I don't have a good ecosystem analogy for competing against their developers,
but I will note that it can be framed in energy terms again. Any other
organism, after watchers other repeatedly expend their energy in a particular
ecosystem only to be crushed will likely decide against attempting to
establish themselves in your ecosystem and instead choose one of several other
competing ecosystems, even those that appear initially less attractive,
because what is the use if you likely end up failing anyway?

So, my takeaway given only my shallow knowledge of what happened based on this
article is that other organizations attempting to establish an ecosystem (and
that is really what they want when they say platform) and reap the numerous
benefits that an ecosystem can produce should spend some time thinking about
how ecosystems become established and thrive in the real world before charging
clumsily forward with their own naive attempts.

~~~
aboodman
This is an overly simplistic analogy.

No platform developer, when faced with weeds would say "let's torch it".

What really happened in my opinion is that they tried a weed killer. However,
as in real gardening, it turned out that distinguishing a weed from a non-weed
is complex, subtle, and full of value judgments. In some cases, even if a
plant has weed-like traits or capabilities, it's not a weed in the eyes of the
gardener. It depends how the capabilities are used.

There were also cascading effects (and here is where I really stretch the
metaphor). Once a few non-weed members of the ecosystem were killed, the
garden suddenly looked a lot less inviting to others.

~~~
jgon
I agree that the analogy is simplistic but I disagree with your weed killer
analogy. I use weed killer on my own lawn and when I do I apply it in a
targeted spray specifically to the weeds in question. I am still making a
judgement and doing the hard work to separate parasites from useful organisms.
Based on the article is sound like they sprayed everything ie removed the apis
in question, and weed killer will indeed kill the grass surrounding the weed
if you are not careful.

So I think that the analogy still stands, in that if you want an ecosystem
there isn't really any way to mechanize it yet and you have to be prepared to
do some of the work by hand. Creating an ecosystem worth having means offering
up interesting capabilities. Offering up interesting capabilities means that
parasites will appear. You can remove the parasites either by removing the
interesting capabilities, or by doing the hard work to single them out. Doing
the former can have grave consequences for your ecosystem even if it appears
easier/cheaper in the short term.

~~~
amirmc
Simplistic or not, I think the analogy serves its purpose very well (thank you
for sharing it). As I was reading the GP post the analogy I was thinking of
was spraying weed-killer indiscriminately everywhere and naively thinking it
would only take out the 'bad-guys'.

Doing it properly does involve understanding both what 'weed' means to you and
'desirable plant' then being careful not to poison the latter (and actually
encourage it) while you try to deal with the former.

------
sidcool
I have had a difficult reading relationship with pandodaily. After some good
initial articles, they started producing trash. This article, for a change, is
reasonably good.

~~~
scholia
Same with Verge. A lot of sites are following Business Insider and Mashable
down the high-volume shit-chute because that's how you make money when people
won't pay for stuff.

~~~
umeshunni
So, what is a good tech blog to read these days?

~~~
freshhawk
Personal blogs mostly, I haven't seen a for profit non-tiny organization ever
not turn into a content farm when it got down to either firing people or
turning on the crap firehose.

Reddit and HN are great for scanning for new bloggers to follow (hence the
number of posts in these places pissed about the Google Reader shutdown).

~~~
sidcool
True, although Reddit's programming subreddit been degrading in value. I have
been trying since a year to revive it by posting regularly, mostly from Hacker
News. I have earned Karma but the subreddit overall is on a downhill journey.

~~~
freshhawk
In my experience they all are, it's pretty much built in to the model (not
just Reddit). If content is determined by voting and the community grows then
you get regression to the mean. And "the mean" type of content is probably why
the early adopters moved to something else in the first place.

------
dano414
My problem with facebook; it's a reminder of how much our current society
bothers me. At first is was cute-- kind of, but as the time went on it just
got nauseating. The narcissism The birthdays The baby picture--animals fine,
but enough with your spawn. The touching quotes The pictures of what you ate.
The head tilted portrait. The reminder that people don't change.

Actually, the only facebook posts I can stomach are from the Amish--sad, but
true.

~~~
omegant
What are this amish posts? I've never seen them(I live in Spain)

~~~
ErikAugust
I believe he's speaking on users in his feed that are Amish:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish)

~~~
omegant
Thank you, I know who the Amish are, it just gave methe impression that he has
subventionated posts by the Amish and not normal feed. I'll check the link
anyway!

------
jeena
Back then I also was working on a Facebook app, not only working but I even
finished it. You were find restaurants in whole europe and book a table right
from facebook inviting your friends and stuff. We were just kicking in the
advertising machinery when we found out that one of our core features,
messaging your friends (about that you got a table for all of you) wasn't
allowed anymore. This was one of the main reasons our application never took
of, the other was that FBML was really slow, so while I had a normal HTML view
which rendered in perhaps 300 ms the roundtrip for FBML from the browser to a
facebook server then to our server then back to facebook and finally to the
browser always took more then two seconds.

But honestly, even if I was disappointed about all the fuckups we as
developers had to deal with, as a user I am really happy about the fact that
there are no attention claiming apps on Facebook, it is actually therefore I
still use Facebook, in my free time as a normal user.

------
killermonkeys
For all this article's many faults, at least it is long-form and has more than
two sources. I hope PandoDaily continues to support long-form journalism and I
hope they inspire other tech blogs to do the same.

------
steven2012
This has unfortunately been my experience with the Facebook Platform as well.
I remember talking with someone 5 years ago, saying that Facebook would be the
one site that they log into in the morning, they would get their daily news,
their friends updates, their word processing, etc. They would never have to
leave the site.

Instead, it hasn't done any of this, and their best attempt at monetization is
"Would you like to buy your friend a gift on their birthday?"

It was obvious with Zynga how quickly things could go viral, and yes,
sometimes things were extremely spammy, but for the most part, you could have
a lot of fun apps on Facebook. Now, there are almost no apps left, except core
Facebook. The only thing people appear to use it for is to get login
information, or for mobile-type contacts information.

I tried making my own Facebook app, and ran into a bunch of issues, including
really poor documentation. You couldn't even google for things, because things
changed so quickly that you couldn't tell which was the most recent
information. It wasn't a pleasant experience at all. It's too bad, because
like the article says, there was so much more potential than what it has
turned into. And I know people have been saying this for years, but I really
am seeing a lot more of my friends simply stop logging into Facebook now,
because it's boring. It will be interesting to see if they have what it takes
to make bold, innovative moves to make the platform more attractive again.

------
coldcode
Maybe Microsoft will buy Facebook and kill two birds with one stone.

~~~
gnaritas
Zuck would never sell.

~~~
bcoates
Maybe not for the money, but I could see Zuckerberg being in charge of
MicroFace being good for him and both companies. Sort of like AOL-Time Warner
only hopefully without the bubble as backdrop.

------
mathattack
I think the "Release now, figure it out later" came to haunt them. By
accepting so many crappy apps, the overall experience declined. They also got
no revenue out of it. Yes, some of the 3rd party apps were leeches on the
motherships. Many more were innocent victims. Now we have an environment of
diminishing utilization, and no apps. How many people really use Facebook now
more than 12 months ago? Or 3 years ago?

------
lazyBilly
Their platform is ok. It jittered a lot, and I'm really not a big fan of the
social graph, but some stuff is good, some stuff is bad, it's on the balance
ok.

The problem is that they're selling advertising access to their people. That's
all they're selling, via direct ads or graph access and 'sharing'.
Impressions. Period. So there's a very natural friction between people who are
investing a bunch of dev time and expecting their impressions for free and
facebook, who doesn't want you to piss off their users with a bunch of spammy
ads without at least paying them for it. So facebook is locking it down,
little by little, and all the devs who were used to getting something for
nothing are seeing their marketing vector dwindle little by little (unless you
pay).

The whole 'review process' I found extra annoying, though. I will tolerate
that shit from Apple, but not from facebook.

------
shmerl
_“Right now, social networks are closed platforms,” Zuckerberg said. “And
today, we’re going to end that.”_

Impossible (for Facebook). Open platforms are open decentralized social
networks like Diaspora. Facebook will always have profiles exploitation
interest and it's a failure by default for anyone caring about openness of the
Web.

------
thetrumanshow
Facebook likely used the platform as a way to spam you and all your friends by
proxy. Thus, the apps took the heat and Facebook got the boost in growth it
needed. Well executed I say.

------
ergit
"North America’s Kik"

Why not just say Canada?

------
jliptzin
A very well-written and judicious obituary of Facebook Platform. I started
building for it shortly after it launched, in late 2007. I had high hopes for
it; I felt I was at the forefront of 'the next big thing,' like others, so I
invested a lot of my time into it. I made apps that served millions of people,
one of which reached #1 in DAU at one point among all apps (back when they
ranked apps by DAU).

As a lone developer keeping up with the changes and additions wasn't easy - I
literally ran the gamut - from FBML to FBJS to FQL to xd_receiver.htm to the
JS SDK to FB Credits to Graph API. Initially I cut them some slack - it was a
new platform, and we all make mistakes.

But things never really got better. I couldn't tell you how many times I came
across 4, 5, 6 different ways to do the same (seemingly simple) interaction
with the platform, only one of which worked, and of course not the officially
documented method. Or inaccurate or nonexistent API docs. Or how many times my
app would suddenly break without pushing any changes - I became accustomed to
just waiting it out until Facebook would release a patch for whatever they
broke, and have to tell my users to just wait it out. This would usually occur
Tuesday night/Wednesday if I remember correctly.

Solutions to problems would usually lie in an obscure forum post after about
10 minutes of googling, posted by another friendly developer who probably tore
his hair out looking for a solution. Ah, the camaraderie. Here's a recent one
I just came across (and they're not hard to find)
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16649634/ios-url-
scheme-f...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16649634/ios-url-scheme-fb-
event-llu-no-longer-working-in-6-1-1) Accepted answers that start with
"Facebook seems to have..." and end with "change or remove them completely at
will" tend to give developers more than a few gray hairs.

It also doesn't help that Facebook tends to treat developers like sheep. At
first this didn't bother me - after all, they weren't forcing me to build apps
for them, and I was free to leave at any time. In the early days I'd contact
developer support (I don't think there's a published number) to report
bugs/issues, suggest improvements, or genuinely ask for help with a problem. I
never got a single non-automated response. Not once. So I stopped wasting my
time and just became more and more bitter with every breaking change.

The 30% credits tax was the inflection point of the downfall. IMHO, that was a
"me too" response to Apple's iOS platform (coincidence that they came up with
the same fee structure?) and was, for me, the tell-tale sign that they were no
longer interested in their developers' well being. Yes, I understand they need
to make money. I am all for ringing the cash register. But Apple and Facebook
are different platforms. Apple has a highly trafficked worldwide app store.
They let me put my app icon on my users' home screens (that's valuable real
estate), and I could push out unlimited notifications to my users' devices to
keep them engaged and coming back with one click, among other things. Facebook
has no such equivalents. I guess you could argue you're paying for the viral
distribution, but after they've heavily curtailed their viral channels and
people have become more and more immune to app invites, there's really no way
to get free distribution anymore from Facebook. You still need to be buying
ads, mostly from them.

If they wanted to make money and curtail spam, all they had to do was charge
developers by each notification, invite, or newsfeed post they'd send out. Set
a fixed price per message, or use a competitive auctioning system like
adwords. The crapplications would never be able to afford their own spam.

I've since migrated my apps away from Facebook, either to mobile or on
standalone web sites. Needless to say, my life as a developer has gotten a lot
easier, and since I have more time to focus on improving my apps rather than
keeping up with breaking changes, I'm doing better than I ever have before.

------
EGreg
[http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-
platfor...](http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platform/)

------
untilHellbanned
Welcome, surprisingly honest reporting on facebook by tech press.

------
hans
we really thought fB was going to become the user auth + data persistence
layer for the entire web as they were pumping this platform idea: like noone
would need to build user account storage ever again, and all the world would
base their user accounts on top of fB ... that would've been worth billion$
but n0t g0nna happ3n.

------
_sabe_
It's like a curse in the software industry to innovate oneself to death.

------
azeemk
This is cool. On MSFT buying someone, I hope it ends up being bbry

