Inspired by the buzz around Breakup Notifier, last week's "Defriend Day" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/04/defriend-day-etique...), and a good excuse to give Node.js a spin, I just launched a new Facebook app: Defriend Alert. The app sends you an email whenever someone defriends you on Facebook.
I built it over a two day span with Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. It's hosted by Duostack (which is an awesome service, btw). I'm typically a Rails guy, and this was my first Node.js app. Very impressed. Looking forward to cranking out a few more apps over the next few weeks.
I love simple and clean apps. It looks good! I've launced my app with the same trio: node.js, express, mongodb. You can see from this url: http://tagsono.me
Every other app that has done this in the past has been slapped down by Facebook for TOS violation.
As a general case, when you're building an app on someone else's platform, you absolutely must know the terms of service of that platform, otherwise you're just wasting your time (unless your goal is to learn the technology and APIs, and there's better ways to do that too!).
And watch out when the TOS changes and leaves you out in the cold. This is why it can be dangerous to build your business on someone else's business.
I'm sorry to be a downer, but is this a problem that really needs to be solved? If somebody unfriends me, it's probably because we hardly talk (if we ever talked) and I won't miss them.
Personally, I think it's intriguing to receive an email immediately after it happens and wonder what went through their mind as they clicked the button.
Hah. Last year I've significantly cut down the number of "friends" on facebook. 6 months later, one of them was the first to notice this missing connection. When asked why, the response was essentially "_because_ it took 6 months to notice" (on top of the original criteria for 12+ months of no communication via FB).
So in the alert message, can you include "... but it was N months since you've last talked, so whatever."?
www.unfriendfinder.com does this too. Actually you can get notifications about unfriends, rejected friend requests and list of all friend requests you sent that have not been responded to yet.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadhttp://www.defriendalert.com
I built it over a two day span with Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. It's hosted by Duostack (which is an awesome service, btw). I'm typically a Rails guy, and this was my first Node.js app. Very impressed. Looking forward to cranking out a few more apps over the next few weeks.
Let me know what you think!
As a general case, when you're building an app on someone else's platform, you absolutely must know the terms of service of that platform, otherwise you're just wasting your time (unless your goal is to learn the technology and APIs, and there's better ways to do that too!).
And watch out when the TOS changes and leaves you out in the cold. This is why it can be dangerous to build your business on someone else's business.
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=19404...
However, FB did remove that specific example from their TOS.
So in the alert message, can you include "... but it was N months since you've last talked, so whatever."?