Does Facebook Have the Right Priorities?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 14th, 2007 1:04 PM
Last week, a new addition to the Facebook platform seemed to go unnoticed. The new multi-friend-selector enables users to select friends from a smaller interface than the existing invite form. I’m sure there had been a number of requests from developers but is this really a significant addition? The platform has a number of issues including random “200 and no data errors” being displayed that cause applications to crash.
There are a number of big changes that we have been writing about as a result of hidden signals that Facebook has been dropping including yesterday’s addition of the “Networking” option to the meeting_for field. I understand that Facebook may have a couple developers that are assigned to minor changes on the platform on a daily basis but there are tons of more important issues to be resolved. One nice feature that I hadn’t noticed is the <fb:mp3> tag which displays an mp3 player for any music file.
While there are some useful features on the Facebook platform, developers are awaiting upgrades to the system that will resolve larger issues and provide greater functionality. The addition of a smaller invite form is something that I personally wasn’t looking for. Were there a lot of developers that were requesting this feature?
October 14th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I was in the process of starting a Facebook application for my company’s project, but decided to put it on hold until Facebook decides to fix things.
Having methods, tags, and pages randomly break is not something developers want to deal with… on top of Facebook changing the way things work seemingly at random, and without any thoughts on backward compatibility.
It may take a few more months until things settle down. In all honesty, the fB Platform should have been tested and debugged for a longer time in private than it apparently was.
You don’t see these problems anywhere else on Facebook. Did they launch Video and then go “oops, hold on” afterwards? Or how about Photos? Or anything else they’ve created?
–Kyle
October 14th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
This wasn’t so much a feature suggestion as something that they’ve been working on so that they can eliminate the old spammy notifications system. I think it’s a reasonable priority, since the notifications spam has gotten pretty bad.