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Give me a break. OpenFlights.org, a completely free open-source flight mapping tool, had a really popular Facebook app that a) let people post a map of their flights to their Facebook profile, and b) post updates on Facebook automatically when they flew somewhere -- not exactly spammy, parasitic or viral, just sharing info with friends. But merely keeping the FB app up and running consumed more support time than the (far more complicated) website itself, because the APIs changed all the bleeping time, and eventually in 2010 Facebook decided that letting people post apps they liked to their profile was Not Allowed(tm). So we gave up, and seeing what has happened in the three years since, I don't regret making that call one bit.

http://openflights.org/blog/2010/11/05/farewell-to-facebook/

This is pretty much why I will never develop a facebook app after having worked at a company that develops apps for facebook. The push fast and break shit mentality is terrible for APIs. It's too much work, and the Mobile space has more opportunities.

Just the thought of having an app inside of an iframe is silly to be honest. It's not the way products are meant to be experienced.

On iOS or Android, you are in someone else's ecosystem, but at least your app takes control of the entire user interface. You cannot have that much control over the customer experience in the context of a facebook frame.

I am curious to know in what way have you felt that the Facebook way of rendering your app in an iframe restricts the user experience?

Your points are fair definitely, but for me as a developer the biggest issue with facebook was the constant breaking of 'old' APIs.

Worked on a facebook app for about 5 months, had to rewrite a significant portion of the UI when a breaking change happened about 3 months in. That one was ok, we learned our lesson and stayed on top of the roadmap of planned changes. However when with a couple weeks prior to release a new major breaking change was announced to be planned for about 6 months later, it was scary...

the consultancy didnt have an issue, they were ok with getting paid over and over to do the same thing, the end user accepted it, but personally i was just bored to death with the we will just keep reimplimenting this every 6-12 months.

The fact that you think your app is cool enough to beat the current competitive landscape in Facebook does not change the fact that the landscape is indeed more competitive.

The article is mostly right. Facebook is now a mature platform (not in a triple-X way). It's no longer the wild west, which is good in some aspects, bad on others.

It is, anyhow, much less the land of infinite opportunities it once was. Again, much like the Wild West.

If by mature you mean its just as likely to shit its pants and call you a harlot, as give you a cookie, like some 102 year old dementia patient, then yet I agree completely.

I actually think it's less competitive than it was a couple of years ago. Many of the developers who were just making social games (Zynga, wooga, King.com) are now heavily focused on mobile titles.

> I'm working on a thing right now that's integrated with Facebook, and I'm excited about it.

As someone who's done that sort of thing, and has had to support it for two years, I can only wish you the very best of luck.

I'll be curious whether your opinion changes in 6-24 months as your current hopes meet the realities of life with Facebook.

I'm not sure how much "social value" can be brought through Facebook apps these days. Let's all remember that the most popular Facebook apps by far are games. Additionally, I for one completely ignore all app notifications/requests, and I suspect most others have developed similar blindness. That means the apps won't spread regardless of how good they are (unless they break the TOS). Unless you pay FB through the nose for each and every user (almost certainly to the point of unprofitably), you are going to have a difficult time even having a chance to communicate your value proposition to potential users, much less acquire actual users. The Facebook platform is no longer a financially viable target for developers of any type of application, spammy or not.

I think part of the reason the most popular Facebook apps appear to be games (I'd need to look at stats but aren't news media type apps more prevalent?) is because Facebook has decimated the value proposition for more sophisticated applications. We ended up abandoning a startup product built on Facebook which was far more sophisticated and interesting than games in our opinion, but it just became clear that Facebook was actively taking off the table any possible commercial benefit of building on their platform. No significant virality to be gained - even if users WANT to share your product it's virtually impossible to do so nowadays as you don't know for sure it'll ever appear in anyone's feed; their Credits payment platform is daylight robbery at 30% for little better than payment processing.

I completely agree with you. It's just not viable.

If you get little to no customer acquisition benefit from building on their platform and they take too much revenue off the table, and if they keep changing things making it hard to remain stable, and it's hard to know if they'll arbitrarily shut you down if they decide you have a lucrative business proposition, why build on it.

I wonder if they suffer an internal lack of imagination as to what people might use their platform for, and therefore don't understand that they've rendered it worthless for many use cases where they could have been a real platform AND generated additional revenues.

The final issue I see is that if you build something innovative on their platform they have every data point they need to see if it's taking off and being successful - probably before you realize it. This means they can shut you down and buil da competitor, or make you a lowball aqui-hire offer with that threat.

Their haste to move quickly has, I think, caused them to make some strategic mistakes in platform strategy which have hurt their long term position as a platform. Of course, they may not care. They may have quietly, internally, abandoned such an aim, and decided they no longer genuinely want to be a platform on which others build sophisticated applications.

I have been working on the platform since 2008. Do not invest heavily on facebook's platform; you will find yourself spending tons of time updating to their latest toolkits every 6 months. You will find that your virality fluctuates wildly with every experiment they do. And you can only contact 5% of your fans. The thing is, you find that after some point your virality is limited with facebook, because facebook actively stops users who legitimately want to share your stuff from doing so.

With that said, apps can benefit from facebook's wide userbase and ease of use. It's a good user base for initial visibility, and for trying out new stuff until your app starts gaining traction on its own. Deep integration with the platform is something i will never do again.

Most developers think that their apps belong to the "something so interesting and cool that you must share it with everyone" category, I am sure you think that your app belongs to that category too.

The problem is that how many apps actually belong to that category? These are the apps on top of my head:

- instagram

- pinterest(sometimes, but, not always)

- what else?

Just go check out your Facebook feed, how many of those activities are actually generated by your favorite apps?

Spotify

First thing that hit me when I visited the link was a huge newsletter overlay on top of the blog, with the blog grayed out in the background. I think that the blog author might be one of the people you mention (the "viral" kind) :)

This post is a BS strawman argument and should not be voted up, let alone the top comment.