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Why Facebook Shut Down the Only Useful App it Ever Had

28 points by peter123 17y ago

swolchok 17y ago
After reading the headline, I was expecting something about the One True Courses App (federated applications destroyed Courses, since there are too many and no one knew which one to pick). I still miss making new connections with people in my college courses.
woodsier 17y ago
I can not decide where I lay on this issue. On one hand I love the ability to interact with facebook through apps such as Tweekdeck (which I can only assume uses this API?). However, this API can be abused by sites to publish 'closed' information. If I create a strictly private profile so that all my status updates are displayed only to my confidants, I have an expectation of privacy. Say Bob is friends with me, however uses this API to publish all my assumedly private status updates to the world on his website www.watch-woodsiers-status-updates.com, without my knowing. Is that right?
- peter123 17y ago
  The thing is, Bob doesn't need the API to publish all your private status to the whole world... he could already do it in plenty other ways. Same thing with email... many of them (eg. gmail) come with RSS feeds.
Loopy 17y ago
I'm with Facebook on this one, users to some degree trust that their Facebook information isn't freely available on the web. Thats an integral part of their business model that the communication is only with friends. As most people find communication with friends to be more important than communication with others on the web i believe that facebooks business model is far superior to twitters and so there is no reason to change it.
- peter123 17y ago
  As far as business models are concerned, having data that is open is more likely to lead to better web monetization like contextual ads. The ability to have inbound links from referral sites and Google is important for ads.
pkulak 17y ago
Facebook's new feed system has more features (privacy) than RSS, and therefor cannot be ported. It's really simple, but people still get all wound up about it. Twitter basically _is_ RSS, so it works great. EDIT: You could have an authenticated feed, I suppose, but that's not what this app did.
jfarmer 17y ago
Facebook always errs on the side of the publisher. Their guiding principle when it comes to user privacy is that if the publisher of some information doesn't want it to show up, or if they change their mind, applications must respect that preference immediately. So, anyone who has worked in this space could've seen this coming a mile away. Anything that indexes even potentially private information, or makes it indexable by third parties, is inevitably going to be shut down.
makeee 17y ago
But why did they need to cache data to provide this service? The script that generates the RSS feed could have just queried the FB API and generated a feed on every load.
rythie 17y ago
You can read RSS along with Facebook's new stream (+Twitter, Flickr etc.) in my app, FriendBinder (http://friendbinder.com http://friendbinder.com), I expect other apps will follow soon. Though I wonder if I should be worried also, even though we don't re-share the data, they seem to be quite picky.

28 points by peter123 17y ago

After reading the headline, I was expecting something about the One True Courses App (federated applications destroyed Courses, since there are too many and no one knew which one to pick). I still miss making new connections with people in my college courses.

woodsier 17y ago

I can not decide where I lay on this issue. On one hand I love the ability to interact with facebook through apps such as Tweekdeck (which I can only assume uses this API?). However, this API can be abused by sites to publish 'closed' information. If I create a strictly private profile so that all my status updates are displayed only to my confidants, I have an expectation of privacy. Say Bob is friends with me, however uses this API to publish all my assumedly private status updates to the world on his website www.watch-woodsiers-status-updates.com, without my knowing. Is that right?

peter123 17y ago
The thing is, Bob doesn't need the API to publish all your private status to the whole world... he could already do it in plenty other ways. Same thing with email... many of them (eg. gmail) come with RSS feeds.

Loopy 17y ago

I'm with Facebook on this one, users to some degree trust that their Facebook information isn't freely available on the web. Thats an integral part of their business model that the communication is only with friends. As most people find communication with friends to be more important than communication with others on the web i believe that facebooks business model is far superior to twitters and so there is no reason to change it.

peter123 17y ago
As far as business models are concerned, having data that is open is more likely to lead to better web monetization like contextual ads. The ability to have inbound links from referral sites and Google is important for ads.

pkulak 17y ago

Facebook's new feed system has more features (privacy) than RSS, and therefor cannot be ported. It's really simple, but people still get all wound up about it. Twitter basically _is_ RSS, so it works great. EDIT: You could have an authenticated feed, I suppose, but that's not what this app did.

jfarmer 17y ago

Facebook always errs on the side of the publisher. Their guiding principle when it comes to user privacy is that if the publisher of some information doesn't want it to show up, or if they change their mind, applications must respect that preference immediately. So, anyone who has worked in this space could've seen this coming a mile away. Anything that indexes even potentially private information, or makes it indexable by third parties, is inevitably going to be shut down.

makeee 17y ago

But why did they need to cache data to provide this service? The script that generates the RSS feed could have just queried the FB API and generated a feed on every load.

rythie 17y ago

You can read RSS along with Facebook's new stream (+Twitter, Flickr etc.) in my app, FriendBinder (http://friendbinder.com http://friendbinder.com), I expect other apps will follow soon. Though I wonder if I should be worried also, even though we don't re-share the data, they seem to be quite picky.