

Thinking about using Facebook Connect on your site? Step one: Abandon your will to live. - travism
http://mushpot.net/item/213

======
zmimon
The small portion of time I spend maintaining a Facebook app that my company
supports is without doubt the most unenjoyable, tedious, soul destroying time
I spend on anything.

What isn't outright broken is ugly, poorly documented, highly fragile (works
one minute then fails, then works again for no reason), unreliable
(occasionally major parts of the API just break during upgrades with no
notice), full of arbitrary and unexplained constraints (how many invites /
notifications / emails etc. you can send all have built in limits per day
after which they just stop working) and if nothing else, it's just ugly as all
hell. Layering FBML on top of HTML and then trying to work with FBJS is a
hellish way to construct a UI.

------
garply
APIs aside, I'm really struck by the lack of professionalism on behalf of the
Facebook employee the author mentioned.

I'm friends with several Facebook employees and several times I've seen this
type of behavior (mostly through notes that the employees share to gripe about
what they perceive to be an obnoxious userbase). One of the more inappropriate
exchanges I remember was where a user sent an admittedly hostile complaint to
Facebook and the employee sent back an even more hostile response - in which
he mentioned that he had checked out the user's profile, noticed he was a
Christian, and then proceeded to mock him for it.

~~~
mcslee
Here's the note in question. I wrote it, and I think your comment
mischaracterizes its true nature.
[http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=27551539159&id=...](http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=27551539159&id=204686)

The purpose of both my note and my personal replies to the hate-mail I
received was not to express hostility. Rather, both were attempts to call
attention to how the veil of anonymity provided by the Internet changes the
way people treat each other, often for the worse. Not too different from the
Hacker News Guidelines: "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face
to face conversation."

My intent in calling out Christianity was not to mock, but rather to make
people reconsider their own behavior by viewing it through the lens of a
belief system they feel strongly enough about to post on their Facebook
profiles.

Happy to discuss further if you still feel my post was inflammatory.

~~~
garply
Thanks for responding to this. It seems I don't have permission to view this
note (probably due to a change in networks on my side) and I believe the
incident was a few months ago, so I may not have perfect recollection of the
note. I hope I didn't mischaracterize your note.

I recall the logic of the note being along the lines of: "You're saying nasty
things to me. I see that you're a Christian. How can you do this when being
hateful is against your religion?" It read to me like a snarky response
calling him a hypocrite (even if you didn't explicitly label him as such).

I have serious problems with this for a few reasons:

First, as a business owner, I don't think an employee should be anything less
than the pinnacle of politeness when dealing with customers (which is what
FB's users amount to - even if they're only paying you with eyeball time).
Implicitly labeling him as a hypocrite was impolite. The note damaged my
opinion of how FB is run as a business.

The second, larger, issue is related to privacy. Personally, I'm not
comfortable with you treating my profile information as anything more than raw
data - as neutral and uninteresting as a set of ones and zeros. Just as I
wouldn't want my doctor to tell people things he knew about me, I don't think
you should reveal information about this guy - either his religion or the
impolite way in which he communicated with you. I seem to recall that
information from his profile not being available to the general public.

Finally, when it comes down to it, his religion just had nothing to do with
whatever feature request / bug report he was making. Just as I wouldn't expect
a waitress to call attention to me having orange hair when I order a burger, I
don't expect you to bring up my personal information when I give you feedback
on your service.

Shortly thereafter, I quit using FB on a regular basis. I did so for several
reasons, but that incident was certainly somewhere in my mind when I quit.

~~~
indigoviolet
That depends on what you consider feedback. In this case, the "feedback" was:

'you are a faggot. this facebook sucks. the one should come back. i want to
kill you. go fuck a man'.

I kid you not. Do you think people (any people, nevermind those who build
products that are given away for free) deserve such abuse?

~~~
teej
These people deserve to be treated with the same courtesy, dignity, and
respect as everyone else. You would be surprised to see how people change when
they get a nice response from a human.

~~~
mcslee
Why are you so eager to jump to their defense, but so reluctant to ask that
they treat me with courtesy, dignity, and respect?

I do, however, agree with you. As I mentioned in the note, I did spend a lot
of time responding courteously to a great deal of personal user feedback.
Having invested significant time doing so, I know and fully appreciate the
difference it makes. I am also personally appreciative when I am on the
receiving end -- I enjoy the thoughtful personal feedback people take the time
to send me, even if it is critical.

I only responded in this manner to the most intensely offensive and bigoted
messages received. I was sent thousands of personal messages in the span of a
few days, a pretty good portion of which suggested I should die.

I also agree with diN0bot. The professional decision is to simply ignore
personal attacks in a professional context. In this case I can ask forgiveness
for a momentary lapse, call attention to the tricky distinction between
personal and professional contexts on Facebook, and chalk some of this
behavior up to stress relief during a period of highly intense work.

------
jasonkester
That pretty much sums up my experience with FB's APIs thus far. Very little
documentation, even to the point where it's hard to figure out what the APIs
even do. Little to no support for languages other than PHP.

It's sad too. If they could put out a working (not even decent, good or
usable, but working as in compilable) C# wrapper for any of their APIs, I'd
have all of my apps using FB to some extent. As it is, it's just a time sink.

------
avdempsey
My thoughts on Facebook Connect in code: <http://dwadwa.com/connect/test.html>

Actually, I like the comment box, took all of a minute to get it to work. But
like the author, I worry about the monoculture.

------
jmtulloss
I've also had some pretty terrible times working with the FB api.

To find the silver lining, it made my app better. Being forced to deal with
frequent errors and service interruptions caused me to think carefully about
error handling, and that work benefited every piece of my app.

I was cursing facebook's name though, every step of the way.

------
StrawberryFrog
What the hate on OpenId in that article?

~~~
skyfaller
Perhaps it is because many less savvy users fail to grasp the concept of a URL
serving as their identity, and find the whole OpenID system to be extremely
confusing. This may result in lots of support tickets / complaints, complaints
lead to hate and hate leads to suffering.

~~~
swivelmaster
...leads to the Dark Side?

------
jrockway
People still care about Facebook? Why?

~~~
brlewis
For about 175,000,000 reasons.

~~~
jaymstr
The fact of the matter is that numbers speak. Facebook is my identity on the
web, and I bet it is yours too. It is too late to turn back. Unless they do
something 10x worse than Beacon, I'm not leaving, and I doubt you will either.

I'm afraid they control your web identity. You know what though, I'm okay with
it. It makes my life easier.

~~~
jrockway
_I bet it is yours too._

I do have a Facebook profile... but I visit the site maybe once every three
months, and all the data is the fake data I put in 4 years ago. My real
identity is this thing called a "web page" that is the first Google result for
my name.

~~~
gaius
I've a friend who is paranoid about his online identity and always gives fake
data to websites. Recently he was ranting that some online car insurance thing
gave him an awful quote, much worse than his present deal. Hmm, could that be
because his fake identity had no credit history...?

The benefits of a coherent identity on and offline are only going to get more
compelling.

~~~
jrockway
I don't think you get credit history by putting correct data into your
Facebook account.

------
bmelton
So I find this interesting in that it flies in the face of a couple common
thoughts.

The common mantra is to release early, release often. Now I admittedly don't
know how often FB is releasing, it seems like the crux of the complaint that
they released too early... and the fix isn't to release more often (at least
at the author's implication.)

Would he honestly rather they hadn't released anything at all? How would you
feel if this were your app? I mean, the critiques seem well-formed, I just
don't know if it's symptomatic of having waited for fixes that aren't coming
or not.

~~~
swivelmaster
I think the rules are different when you're creating an API that's supposed to
be used by thousands of developers and millions of people right off the bat.
FB is no longer a startup and developers are depending on them not just for
the apps to 'work', but for their very livelihoods.

The app I'm working on _for a living_ was brought down recently because FB
changed the name of a method in their javascript library.

Once the origin of the bug was discovered it was easy to fix, but that's still
a pretty unreasonable thing to do when, as was the case, a major library that
is linked to from the very front of the wiki (the FB/AS3 bridge) is broken by
an update.

It's also pretty painful when the median call to a certain specific API method
is about a second or two, but the peak is literally ten seconds.

~~~
albemuth
Facebook has a dev feed where they announce platform changes and they have a
staging platform for you to test the new changes. And do not assume the api
call is 2 seconds, now that you know this is not the case take measures(ajax)
to minimize impact.

~~~
swivelmaster
They did not announce the change that I mentioned. In addition, the app broke
on a Monday night, which is NOT when platform updates get rolled out.

Someone was editing the code on the live site and made an undocumented change.

The call I'm talking about is a javascript call made through a Flash app. The
problem isn't that a page is timing out, the problem is that we have to wait
for this call for the app to allow the user to continue.

------
treyp
yeeeeep, welcome to the platform.

~~~
treyp
I should probably clarify. I've worked with the Facebook Platform since it was
launched at F8 in 2007. I definitely agree with and appreciate the idea. I
also understand that the company is pretty inundated with response that
they've had.

However, I can personally keep up with the number of bug reports. Most of them
go unnoticed. Unfortunately, it seems like only the absolute giants (the
entire platform being down, for instance) and a few random ones get attention
at all. For example, two major incomplete parts of the platform: support for
the Info tab, which was planned, seems like it was just abandoned. How long
has the "new" Facebook been out? Another major recent one -- businesses can
sign up for accounts without creating a profile. This special business account
can manage a business Page, but that's it. Unfortunately, _no_ applications
work with these new "business accounts" because the platform basically doesn't
validate this type of user. I get messages about this on a daily basis, and I
run just one application. I've been in touch with the Senior Platform Manager
and the Platform Program Manager, but nothing has changed.

I can also say, more importantly, that there are regularly problems with it in
general. Like what has been mentioned here already, things break at random,
unannounced times. I've noticed that other, announced changes have been given
too little notice for developers to keep up. And most frustratingly, when you
start building on a buggy and incomplete platform, you can often spend copious
amounts of time trying to find a bug in your code, only to find out that the
bug is in fact Facebook's. I'm sure that any of the active developers in the
community will tell you the best piece of advice -- when there's a problem
with your app, always assume it's Facebook's fault first.

And it's tough dealing with a problem when it's out of your hands. When you
get that rush of messages from your users about something breaking, it's
embarrassing telling them that it's something you can't fix. It happens
regularly. The users assume it's your fault, and your application is penalized
for it (users remove it, give it bad reviews).

Anyway, this is enough ranting. I'm not sure if it's a staffing problem or
what, but hopefully these APIs will receive more attention one day.

------
zxcvb
Horrible writing style. Made me stop reading after the first two paragraphs.

~~~
travism
Looks like you created an account just to leave this comment...ouch.

But seriously, thanks for the feedback. I was trying capture my feelings about
FB before I lost them, and I'd be surprised if you were the only one who found
the tone obnoxious.

