18 ms·

Thinking about using Facebook Connect on your site? Step one: Abandon your will to live.

72 points by travism 18y ago

avdempsey 18y ago
My thoughts on Facebook Connect in code: http://dwadwa.com/connect/test.html 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.
bmelton 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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.
  - almost 18y ago
    You're depending on a facebook app for a living? How is that working? I thought after they moved apps to the Boxes Tab ghetto it would have pretty much killed off anything like that? Well done if it's working for you though, hope it continues to.
  - albemuth 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      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.
- cookiecaper 18y ago
  Release early, release often is great when products released under that philosophy are labeled correctly. Facebook's API does not have the typical warning labels about shifting API calls, development releases, or technology previews; these are the final, real versions, and they're expecting people to just roll with it when they whimsically decide to rename an API call or database field. If you expect people to just roll with that kind of thing, that's cool, but you have to provide fair warning -- you can't just recruit tens of thousands of corporations to use your software and then go making API-breaking changes willy-nilly. The open-source community, where _all_ development at every stage usually occurs out in the open, takes stability, etc., very seriously. It's good and important that early versions of software are available, but they're tagged as such; ext4 had been in a stabilized "experimental" mode for the last two years or so, and it was relatively stable during that. Very early work on Firefox is available, but it's not pushed out until it has a year or so to mature, and it's billed as alpha and beta, despite the fact that the Fx 3 betas were rock solid, as are the 3.1s. When KDE released 4.0, they gave everyone fair warning: despite the name, it was still an experimental platform and release. This is serious business. There's nothing wrong with releasing early and releasing often and sharing your contributions and collaborating -- that's good, and would probably help Facebook a lot if they would take it to heart. The bad thing here is that Facebook is actively promoting and encouraging new users to adopt this platform for incorporation into live, production-level applications, and then breaking the API and engaging in other assorted mischief without notice. That's horrible. :(
jasonkester 18y ago
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.
zmimon 18y ago
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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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=204686 http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=27551539159&id=... 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.
  - psyklic 18y ago
    You have the wrong attitude if you feel that you need to tell customers to "reconsider their own behavior." From this reply, it sounds like you're insulting your customer by pretending to know more about their religion than them. That's not cool. It is very unprofessional to comment on irrelevant personal information you have stored about a customer.
    - natrius 18y ago
      If you send someone a message on Facebook, the recipient can view your profile. There was no breach of privacy here.
jmtulloss 18y ago
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.
jrockway 18y ago
People still care about Facebook? Why?
- brlewis 18y ago
  For about 175,000,000 reasons.
  - tmilewski 18y ago
    This is true. Regardless of our opinions of Facebook, it has been able to find its way into the daily workflow of the lives of an exponential number of people. This makes it a huge asset to many parties.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      175M people that don't click ads, and have no money.
      - gnaritas 18y ago
        Funny how everyone seems to totally overlook that simple fact.
      - jskopek 18y ago
        They're still valuable, only not in a advertising-driven model. As a platform though, it has a ton of value; when the majority of a company's employees are connected on a system they use personally on a daily basis, there's a lot of potential. When an entire city is connected, you open the door to interaction that haven't been possible until now. Facebook could replace dating, restaurant review, business productivity, classified sites, and expand into things we haven't thought of yet, but that requires a substantial user base. The company is still growing out of its college foundation, but judging by its growing acceptance among the 25+ age group, it could start gaining value fast.
  - jaymstr 18y ago
    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.
StrawberryFrog 18y ago
What the hate on OpenId in that article?
- skyfaller 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    ...leads to the Dark Side?
- travism 18y ago
  Sorry to be a hater. I was gung ho OpenID for a while...simple for users, decentralized. But then I tried to get my wife and my mom to log into my site with it and they were baffled. "Login with Facebook" they can sort of get. And then I found that the openid consumer I wrote (I used some library, I don't remember which) didn't work with yahoo and a bunch of other providers, which really got my goat. But when I said I was happy OpenID was gone, it was more because I think we're one step closer to whatever will be a better, widely-accepted, and more polished solution, not because of any particular disdain for openid. I'm fascinated that Facebook would join OpenID. http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html. Sounds like a fox in the henhouse to me.
zxcvb 18y ago
Horrible writing style. Made me stop reading after the first two paragraphs.
- travism 18y ago
  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.
treyp 18y ago
yeeeeep, welcome to the platform.
- treyp 18y ago
  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.
1111 17y ago
ggdff

72 points by travism 18y ago

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

bmelton 18y ago

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 18y ago
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.
- almost 18y ago
  You're depending on a facebook app for a living? How is that working? I thought after they moved apps to the Boxes Tab ghetto it would have pretty much killed off anything like that? Well done if it's working for you though, hope it continues to.
- albemuth 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.
cookiecaper 18y ago
Release early, release often is great when products released under that philosophy are labeled correctly. Facebook's API does not have the typical warning labels about shifting API calls, development releases, or technology previews; these are the final, real versions, and they're expecting people to just roll with it when they whimsically decide to rename an API call or database field. If you expect people to just roll with that kind of thing, that's cool, but you have to provide fair warning -- you can't just recruit tens of thousands of corporations to use your software and then go making API-breaking changes willy-nilly. The open-source community, where _all_ development at every stage usually occurs out in the open, takes stability, etc., very seriously. It's good and important that early versions of software are available, but they're tagged as such; ext4 had been in a stabilized "experimental" mode for the last two years or so, and it was relatively stable during that. Very early work on Firefox is available, but it's not pushed out until it has a year or so to mature, and it's billed as alpha and beta, despite the fact that the Fx 3 betas were rock solid, as are the 3.1s. When KDE released 4.0, they gave everyone fair warning: despite the name, it was still an experimental platform and release. This is serious business. There's nothing wrong with releasing early and releasing often and sharing your contributions and collaborating -- that's good, and would probably help Facebook a lot if they would take it to heart. The bad thing here is that Facebook is actively promoting and encouraging new users to adopt this platform for incorporation into live, production-level applications, and then breaking the API and engaging in other assorted mischief without notice. That's horrible. :(

jasonkester 18y ago

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.

zmimon 18y ago

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 18y ago

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 18y ago
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=204686 http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=27551539159&id=... 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.
- psyklic 18y ago
  You have the wrong attitude if you feel that you need to tell customers to "reconsider their own behavior." From this reply, it sounds like you're insulting your customer by pretending to know more about their religion than them. That's not cool. It is very unprofessional to comment on irrelevant personal information you have stored about a customer.
  - natrius 18y ago
    If you send someone a message on Facebook, the recipient can view your profile. There was no breach of privacy here.

jmtulloss 18y ago

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.

jrockway 18y ago

People still care about Facebook? Why?

brlewis 18y ago
For about 175,000,000 reasons.
- tmilewski 18y ago
  This is true. Regardless of our opinions of Facebook, it has been able to find its way into the daily workflow of the lives of an exponential number of people. This makes it a huge asset to many parties.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    175M people that don't click ads, and have no money.
    - gnaritas 18y ago
      Funny how everyone seems to totally overlook that simple fact.
    - jskopek 18y ago
      They're still valuable, only not in a advertising-driven model. As a platform though, it has a ton of value; when the majority of a company's employees are connected on a system they use personally on a daily basis, there's a lot of potential. When an entire city is connected, you open the door to interaction that haven't been possible until now. Facebook could replace dating, restaurant review, business productivity, classified sites, and expand into things we haven't thought of yet, but that requires a substantial user base. The company is still growing out of its college foundation, but judging by its growing acceptance among the 25+ age group, it could start gaining value fast.
- jaymstr 18y ago
  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.

StrawberryFrog 18y ago

What the hate on OpenId in that article?

skyfaller 18y ago
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 18y ago
  ...leads to the Dark Side?
travism 18y ago
Sorry to be a hater. I was gung ho OpenID for a while...simple for users, decentralized. But then I tried to get my wife and my mom to log into my site with it and they were baffled. "Login with Facebook" they can sort of get. And then I found that the openid consumer I wrote (I used some library, I don't remember which) didn't work with yahoo and a bunch of other providers, which really got my goat. But when I said I was happy OpenID was gone, it was more because I think we're one step closer to whatever will be a better, widely-accepted, and more polished solution, not because of any particular disdain for openid. I'm fascinated that Facebook would join OpenID. http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html. Sounds like a fox in the henhouse to me.

zxcvb 18y ago

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

travism 18y ago
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.

treyp 18y ago

yeeeeep, welcome to the platform.

treyp 18y ago
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.

1111 17y ago

ggdff