Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Facebook Launches Statistics for Developers
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007Last night Facebook announced a new stats page for developers. The new statistics are nothing to brag about. The only additional information that is being displayed is the total number of adds, removes, blocks and unblocks from the previous day. Additionally you can view the status returns of each page request. All of these things are statistics that developers should be tracking internally anyways.
While the new statistics are extremely limited, it does show Facebook’s intention to eventually display more detailed statistics. What would be nice to see is some sort of advanced analytics that displays demographic information for each page being viewed. I’ve been hearing that Facebook is going to release an analytics package around the same time that they launch their new advertising platform. Analytics are going to be critical to the success of their advertising platform. Google has been successful with detailed analytics. It is now time for Facebook to show that they can provide more detailed analytics based on detailed demographic information, especially if they are going to be considered a 10 or 15 billion dollar company.
Facebook Launches Bug Tracking System for Developers
Monday, September 24th, 2007If you ever questioned Facebook’s dedication to its developer base, this should lower your concerns a little. Facebook has launched a public bug tracking system. While not a huge development undertaking, given that they leveraged the Bugzilla bug tracking system, all complaints were previously being emailed and posted in the developer forum. Want to track the status of your bug? Simply log in to bugzilla.
This is going to make it much easier for Facebook to track all the issues they are having with the platform. One thing that I wonder about the new bug tracking system is whether or not the system should be used to file complaits about applications being shut down (as Jason Beckerman previously experience) and similar complaints which aren’t necessarily development oriented. One thing is for sure: Facebook is dedicated to developers that are building applications on their platform.
The better the relationship between Facebook and the developers, the better relationships will be between developers and clients. Now the only step left for Facebook is to launch some sort of general support inquiry line. I would imagine Facebook will eventually have a call center in India answering all responses, especially if they end up raising another $500 million.
Facebook Ups the Application Limit
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007For those developers that were having troubles building new applications because they had so many in development as well as in production, worry no longer. Last night, Facebook updated the maximum number of API keys per developer from 10 to 100. This will surely make room for those that have an overload of applications! The only downside to this is that those that are looking to poach Facebook URLs will now have a higher limit.
Perhaps that’s why they discreetly posted about it as a platform status update rather than on their blog or in their developer news. Whatever their rationale, this will definitely make life easier for many of us. Facebook is truly showing their dedication to making the developers happier.
Facebook Javascript Launches
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007The FBJS tag which had been in beta for the past month or so in now live. All Facebook applications can now utilize Javascript. Facebook also has a built in AJAX object that enables developers to build all the AJAXy goodness into their applications that they’d like. The one pitfall is that you can’t use javascript includes. While easy to workaround, it is one difference from standard web page.
Slowly but surely, Facebook is providing developers with limitless capabilities through building out their feature set. Any competing platform is going to have to go through the same evolution which means that Facebook is going to maintain their position as the platform leader for the foreseeable future.
Facebook Developers Face A Challenge
Monday, August 6th, 2007This morning when I walked into my office I stopped to chat with the developer who is creating our application. We discussed some of the features we were working on and also something that has been the primary issue with developing on the platform: a lack of documentation. The existing documentation for the platform is sufficient for developing applications but that is about as far as it goes. Additionally, there is much discussion on the developer forums but many people don’t seem to have answers. The only conclusion I come up with is that those developers that figure out how to make something work on the platform have little incentive to share that information with other developers. While the Facebook development platform is nowhere near open-source, it does have a massive community of developers that can help to support each other.
Why then are they not helping as much as they often do in an open-source environment? The only conclusion that I can draw is the monetary incentive of developing a successful application. If a developer can protect their information for as long as possible, it provides a competitive advantage. Maybe I’m wrong on this though since I’m not highly active in the developer forums. Additionally, Facebook has opted to provide the bare minimum amount of information when describing their API. All I can say is that they are not making it easy for application developers as they constantly update the API. Perhaps this is simply the downfall of developing on an everchanging platform.
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