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.
- 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.
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/
2008-2009 I dealt with the Facebook API and they often broke things. The breaking changes notifications have improved things, but they still break things. Their insight analytics was broken for about a year. They just don't seem to care about their API.
Agreed. I've been working with their API for the last 2 years. When it does break it can take forever to get a response. I work for a Facebook preferred developer so we have an extra channel for getting bug feedback. If we weren't a preferred developer, we would have had API bugs go unaddressed for months. Sure there were warnings about some changes, but sometimes major changes occurred that we did not see coming and had to scramble to figure out workarounds.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
I'm not an fb developer and don't know the platform, but was that documented as the format? i.e. were you expected/allowed to destructure an id in that way or was it intended to be opaque?
You are allowed to deconstruct the id that way because it's the only way to get the information. It's not a property or value, it's part of the id. You then use these three parts to get the rest of the information.
It's not documented as a format (very little is) but it's been this way since at least 2011-ish.
If there is a better way to get this information it is also undocumented.
> You are allowed to deconstruct the id that way because it's the only way to get the information.
If the API has a usable purpose without providing that info, then I think I'd disagree with you - since you're reverse-engineering the implementation to get more data out.
Reverse engineering is OK, but implicitly carries the risk that stuff will change and break you without warning, in which case you can't really complain, in my opinion.
If the API's purpose can't be fulfilled without that info, then the API was probably broken as designed (you needed to parse the id to get the info, they just didn't document it).
It's not that simple, the id returned for a post should allow to like/unlike the post according to documentation.
Liking works, but unliking does not in cases where the post_id returned has the profile_id prefixed. So you have to remove the profile_id from the post_id to unlike.
The reason why developers have to reverse engineer is that the Facebook platform doesn't and did never work the way it is documented.
I've suffered from having designed bad/limited APIs before and watching as people dig into bits I didn't want them to dig into, limiting what I can do in the future.
Not sure on the best way to avoid it, but I guess it's a 'nice problem to have' since at least people are using your API.
Hi. I work on Facebook's documentation for developers. It's true that IDs are opaque and I don't think that we declare that anywhere in particular. (It's a known unknown?)
I've updated the Graph API getting started guide to mention the fact that IDs are opaque and also mentioned it in our comments guide since comments are one of the few places where we have IDs that are made up of other keys.
Thanks for the feedback - it's good to hear about things we can fix.
Even though it generally drives me nuts, the "move fast and break things" mindset can work in some situations. Building a platform for others to rely upon is not one of them. I never understood why they repeatedly broke their platform so much, unless they honestly did not care how it affected those downstream. But if they didn't care, why even build a platform? Even the most cowboy of coders can see why always breaking others is bad. Baffling.
I don't know if you are a developer or not. But the entire industry is moving towards the Facebook model i.e. those people would be highly desired in many places. The "theory" is that developers can't be reckless because all of the automated testing that goes on before anything is put into production.
Not if you're making APIs, which is essentially what the entire platform is.
The "Move Fast and Break Things" attitude is fine when you're releasing a complete product. Look at Twitter or GMail. Google and Twitter change their interfaces pretty much constantly, and outside of a few hours or days of grumbling, pretty much everyone goes back to using the services.
But if you're providing functionality that other people are coding against, it's a cardinal sin to break your API without warning everyone. When making API's, slower and more monolithic releases is often a better approach. It not only gives your teams time to develop and test the features, but it also gives downstream users of your API time to absorb the changes.
Revenue stream was a pretty big miss. Devs weren't offered a share of the facebook ads income for views on their apps and they had no way to fund paid apps. So 3rd parties came in to cover the gap and then Facebook didn't like it so they started banning them or trying to force their own half baked solutions.
>> - Not building in a revenue model into their platform, like Apple did with iOS. This is so stupid.
It was not completely obvious in 2007 that in-app virtual item transactions were to stay. Facebook itself was playing around with virtual gifts, but convincing users to pull out their credit card on a social network was novel.
It was pretty hard to predict specific monetization pattern - iLike looked into ticket-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.
Was it that hard? "If you make money on our platform, you need to give us a percentage," seems sort of like an obvious monetization strategy. Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Most of the apps at the time optimized for pageviews and monetized through DoubleClick, AdSense and other third-party ad networks, so there was non-trivial task of proving that "making money" was happening, followed by further non-trivial task of actually collecting such revenue from all of the jurisdictions.
>> Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Facebook displays its own ads on application canvas pages. Therefore higher engagement with apps => higher pageviews => higher earnings.
I think Zuckerberg was especially naive in this regard; I suspect he truly thought FB could successfully execute the "totally fair and open platform" strategy.
To be fair, other platforms had done so in the past: Windows, OSX, even iOS (though less so). I figure the problem was at least somewhat because you couldn't match Facebook's "native apps" with 3rd party-- it was a technically weak platform.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
I agree with you- basing a startup on one of these platforms is incredibly risky (on top of the standard high risk that all startups have).
I myself have written a TON of code for Twitter, for example, that is no longer useful due to ever-increasing restrictions on the Twitter API (combined with the network growing more and more. I want my 20k API requests per hour back!). Since these platforms can change their terms and access at any moment, you could easily have a great idea and implementation that they invalidate accidentally (or intentionally). That's just too much risk for me.
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.
Facebook insistently tried and failed to help "serious" non-game apps before. I don't understand what's the problem with games and why they don't capitalize on it (they should have bought zynga). Facebook is too crowded for anything more serious than gossip.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
<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>
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...
“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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I interpreted it as: they removed an API (or reduce the functionality of an API in a way that) they thought was only useful to weeds. But it turned out that there were legitimate uses for that functionality, and it hurt more than just weeds.
I don't really know the details; this is just reflecting my experience from working on platforms.
As you say, in many cases, it ultimately requires human judgement, which is something that engineers are loathe to rely upon.
The cost of parasites was too high for facebook, when weighted against the opportunities: facebook is all about being flat and appealing to the general public, complexities like possible scams are putting off too many potential users.
Facebook could not have grown to its present size if it had not killed the platform.
Also they can't share the social graph; the monopoly on the data that they have gathered on us is the whole point/worth/wealth of the company.
If facebook or google run into financial problems (this might happen if tax loopholes are closed, and countries decide that even big companies have to pay real corporate taxes) then these companies will be bailed out as they are 'too big to fail'.
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.
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.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread- 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.
Apps aside, the proportion of basic wall pageloads that hang due to, I'm assuming, some javascript complexity approaches 100%.
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/
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.
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.
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.
It's not documented as a format (very little is) but it's been this way since at least 2011-ish.
If there is a better way to get this information it is also undocumented.
If the API has a usable purpose without providing that info, then I think I'd disagree with you - since you're reverse-engineering the implementation to get more data out.
Reverse engineering is OK, but implicitly carries the risk that stuff will change and break you without warning, in which case you can't really complain, in my opinion.
If the API's purpose can't be fulfilled without that info, then the API was probably broken as designed (you needed to parse the id to get the info, they just didn't document it).
Liking works, but unliking does not in cases where the post_id returned has the profile_id prefixed. So you have to remove the profile_id from the post_id to unlike.
The reason why developers have to reverse engineer is that the Facebook platform doesn't and did never work the way it is documented.
Here's a bugreport for that problem which hasn't been solved since last February! (The top comment here with a workaround for that issue was created by myself: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/539328566085833?browse=...)
I've suffered from having designed bad/limited APIs before and watching as people dig into bits I didn't want them to dig into, limiting what I can do in the future.
Not sure on the best way to avoid it, but I guess it's a 'nice problem to have' since at least people are using your API.
I've updated the Graph API getting started guide to mention the fact that IDs are opaque and also mentioned it in our comments guide since comments are one of the few places where we have IDs that are made up of other keys.
Thanks for the feedback - it's good to hear about things we can fix.
The "Move Fast and Break Things" attitude is fine when you're releasing a complete product. Look at Twitter or GMail. Google and Twitter change their interfaces pretty much constantly, and outside of a few hours or days of grumbling, pretty much everyone goes back to using the services.
But if you're providing functionality that other people are coding against, it's a cardinal sin to break your API without warning everyone. When making API's, slower and more monolithic releases is often a better approach. It not only gives your teams time to develop and test the features, but it also gives downstream users of your API time to absorb the changes.
It was not completely obvious in 2007 that in-app virtual item transactions were to stay. Facebook itself was playing around with virtual gifts, but convincing users to pull out their credit card on a social network was novel.
It was pretty hard to predict specific monetization pattern - iLike looked into ticket-selling, Visual Bookshelf would do affiliate links to Amazon, Slide's apps would monetize through standard banner ads (and later video ads), Zynga was not even around at the time.
>> Otherwise, what's the point of building the platform?
Facebook displays its own ads on application canvas pages. Therefore higher engagement with apps => higher pageviews => higher earnings.
Why not just say Canada?
I can't imagine people were so naive they would think Facebook would let this platform be a "level playing field".
Reality did not agree.
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.
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).
Otherwise it depends on your interests. I'm most likely to check out Anandtech, Ars Technica, Wired, and some ZDNet bloggers.
> 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.
I myself have written a TON of code for Twitter, for example, that is no longer useful due to ever-increasing restrictions on the Twitter API (combined with the network growing more and more. I want my 20k API requests per hour back!). Since these platforms can change their terms and access at any moment, you could easily have a great idea and implementation that they invalidate accidentally (or intentionally). That's just too much risk for me.
The NSA would like to disagree....
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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>
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.
Actually, the only facebook posts I can stomach are from the Amish--sad, but true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't really know the details; this is just reflecting my experience from working on platforms.
As you say, in many cases, it ultimately requires human judgement, which is something that engineers are loathe to rely upon.
Also they can't share the social graph; the monopoly on the data that they have gathered on us is the whole point/worth/wealth of the company.
If facebook or google run into financial problems (this might happen if tax loopholes are closed, and countries decide that even big companies have to pay real corporate taxes) then these companies will be bailed out as they are 'too big to fail'.