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Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ec

Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed that scene, not lack of hosting support.

tlack 15y ago
Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling. If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support. Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiative and then completely forget about it, like their Stack Overflow support system which does not seem to have nearly enough participation from actual Facebook employees who can answer questions.
- sondh 15y ago
  I don't really get the idea of the app but anyway, TechCrunch Disrupt winner is Shaker.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
div 15y ago
One of the major pains when writing facebook apps is that their documentation is either incorrect, out of date or non-existant. If you create a facebook app using heroku, it looks like you get something akin to a facebook-boilerplate app that is already deployed. I would imagine the people at Heroku / Facebook spending some effort in keeping their boilerplate app / demo up to date with any api changes that may occur.
blored 15y ago
You're right. I work full time on Facebook Applications and there are several things hindering the FB Platform. First is the lack of moderation of apps. Secondly, the approved advertiser list has too many companies promoting mobile offers (which are spammy) (http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/ http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/). As a consequence Application ads are seedy. Think 'You have 1 new message' type ads, or "Are you smarter than Obama" type ads. Thirdly, the whole Permissions/Authentication system needs to be improved. The Permissions wall in its current embodiment advertise the negatives of adding an Application. Even if you disagree with the above, you should agree that an API that accounts for 10% of a site's traffic, like Facebook's, is a struggling ecosystem. Src: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-apps-2011-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-apps-2011-...
sgentle 15y ago
Well, as we saw with iOS, inconsistent policies and favouritism don't necessarily kill a platform. I think this is a big deal because the law of demand is a big deal. What the Facebook/Heroku partnership means is that if I'm some 19 year old with a cool idea, I don't need money or experience in hosting, I just have to write the code to do it. Calling that "modernising" is missing the point entirely. To return to the iOS analogy, there were a lot of people who said "well, yeah, so Apple made an integrated platform for developing and selling software - but what does that get us that we didn't have before?" The answer to that question depends on whether you consider $1.7 billion in revenue novel or not.
briandoll 15y ago
I personally rarely ever log into Facebook, so perhaps if you're closeness to the platform is from arms length too, I can see where you might be missing the news. Let's use photos as an example to demonstrate the power and size of Facebook. This infographic shows the scale of photos stored in the Library of Congress, Flickr, and Facebook: http://s3.amazonaws.com/fromus/blog_posts/largest_photo_libraries.png http://s3.amazonaws.com/fromus/blog_posts/largest_photo_libr... I work at New Relic, so I see a lot of companies (startups and otherwise) that have apps deployed on Facebook. The traffic they get is _insane_ and I don't see any indication that it's slowing down. Games are an obvious category where Facebook dominates, but they are quickly becoming an obvious destination for new apps to launch, given the access to their social graph and the viral nature of the apps in general. This isn't about hosting. This is about creating a living Facebook app in 5 seconds.
chaz 15y ago
It's not about the hosting. It's about speed to first code commit. When you're setting up your first Facebook app, there's a bunch of docs to read, you need to create keys/IDs, figure out the URLs you need to populate, understand how FB Connect works, etc. As someone who tinkers with FB apps and not actually launched one, it took me most of a day to setup a fresh EC2 instance and get everything configured. However, it took me only 10 minutes to get my first "Hello world" app launched, without having ever used Heroku before. That's the big step forward here -- a turnkey skeleton app that eliminates the initial frustration. For big app developers, this is of no value. It's for tinkerers like the rest of us to get to baseline faster, and is designed for us to get sold on Heroku and get our feet wet with FB app development.
noahth 15y ago
There are others, depending in part on your definition of success. Playfish & Playdom, for example. Non-game success stories are less common (afaik) but there are still some rising stars there, too - biggest example I can think of off-hand is RootMusic.

tlack 15y ago

Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling. If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support. Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiative and then completely forget about it, like their Stack Overflow support system which does not seem to have nearly enough participation from actual Facebook employees who can answer questions.

sondh 15y ago
I don't really get the idea of the app but anyway, TechCrunch Disrupt winner is Shaker.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

div 15y ago

One of the major pains when writing facebook apps is that their documentation is either incorrect, out of date or non-existant. If you create a facebook app using heroku, it looks like you get something akin to a facebook-boilerplate app that is already deployed. I would imagine the people at Heroku / Facebook spending some effort in keeping their boilerplate app / demo up to date with any api changes that may occur.

blored 15y ago

You're right. I work full time on Facebook Applications and there are several things hindering the FB Platform. First is the lack of moderation of apps. Secondly, the approved advertiser list has too many companies promoting mobile offers (which are spammy) (http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/ http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/). As a consequence Application ads are seedy. Think 'You have 1 new message' type ads, or "Are you smarter than Obama" type ads. Thirdly, the whole Permissions/Authentication system needs to be improved. The Permissions wall in its current embodiment advertise the negatives of adding an Application. Even if you disagree with the above, you should agree that an API that accounts for 10% of a site's traffic, like Facebook's, is a struggling ecosystem. Src: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-apps-2011-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-apps-2011-...

sgentle 15y ago

Well, as we saw with iOS, inconsistent policies and favouritism don't necessarily kill a platform. I think this is a big deal because the law of demand is a big deal. What the Facebook/Heroku partnership means is that if I'm some 19 year old with a cool idea, I don't need money or experience in hosting, I just have to write the code to do it. Calling that "modernising" is missing the point entirely. To return to the iOS analogy, there were a lot of people who said "well, yeah, so Apple made an integrated platform for developing and selling software - but what does that get us that we didn't have before?" The answer to that question depends on whether you consider $1.7 billion in revenue novel or not.

briandoll 15y ago

I personally rarely ever log into Facebook, so perhaps if you're closeness to the platform is from arms length too, I can see where you might be missing the news. Let's use photos as an example to demonstrate the power and size of Facebook. This infographic shows the scale of photos stored in the Library of Congress, Flickr, and Facebook: http://s3.amazonaws.com/fromus/blog_posts/largest_photo_libraries.png http://s3.amazonaws.com/fromus/blog_posts/largest_photo_libr... I work at New Relic, so I see a lot of companies (startups and otherwise) that have apps deployed on Facebook. The traffic they get is _insane_ and I don't see any indication that it's slowing down. Games are an obvious category where Facebook dominates, but they are quickly becoming an obvious destination for new apps to launch, given the access to their social graph and the viral nature of the apps in general. This isn't about hosting. This is about creating a living Facebook app in 5 seconds.

chaz 15y ago

It's not about the hosting. It's about speed to first code commit. When you're setting up your first Facebook app, there's a bunch of docs to read, you need to create keys/IDs, figure out the URLs you need to populate, understand how FB Connect works, etc. As someone who tinkers with FB apps and not actually launched one, it took me most of a day to setup a fresh EC2 instance and get everything configured. However, it took me only 10 minutes to get my first "Hello world" app launched, without having ever used Heroku before. That's the big step forward here -- a turnkey skeleton app that eliminates the initial frustration. For big app developers, this is of no value. It's for tinkerers like the rest of us to get to baseline faster, and is designed for us to get sold on Heroku and get our feet wet with FB app development.

noahth 15y ago

There are others, depending in part on your definition of success. Playfish & Playdom, for example. Non-game success stories are less common (afaik) but there are still some rising stars there, too - biggest example I can think of off-hand is RootMusic.