If you are going to build an application on Facebook, you’d expect that users will be able to access your application as long as it’s developed properly, but unfortunately Facebook’s reliability has not been at its peak recently. Yesterday the company posted that they were “investigating issues that may be causing some Platform apps to fail to load”. While the volume of errors appeared to hit a new high yesterday, the Facebook Platform’s reliability had been at an all-time low for over a month now.
While speaking at the Facebook Developer Garage at SXSW last week, Gareth Davis, Facebook’s program manager for games, fielded a question from a developer who asked about the Platform’s reliability. At the time he admitted that “February was a difficult month”, according to a number of attendees. It appears that the company is continuing to experience some challenges in maintaining Platform reliability this month as well.
Today the company was dealing with API latency issues which was a continuation of some of the problems from yesterday. One developer told me off the record that he believed Facebook was cutting down on app virality for two reasons: increase ad spend by developers (as advertising is an integral component of successful applications) and to increase the platform reliability.
So far it appears as though the initial drop in traffic has only affected specific categories of applications (dating and quizzes), but the larger issue for most developers has been uptime. Facebook is working hard to improve the reliability of the platform, but scaling a Platform which serves over 400 million users while opening up the information available to developers has been difficult.
While Facebook has not specifically articulated the causes of the issues the company continues to work on improving API reliability as it’s not only critical to the success of the Platform but Facebook Connect as well. With Facebook preparing to open up even more data at the upcoming f8 event, it’s important that the company resolve the Platform uptime issues sooner rather than later.
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This has been a very frustrating problem for us at iFan Design. Images failing to cache, question marks, share link broken, suggest to friends not working to name but a few over the past month, not to mention API latency as you quite rightly point out.
The biggest frustration is that as developers we become "middle-men" at the mercy of Facebook managers who must pressure their internal devs to roll out platform changes before they are thoroughly checked. Clients pay us for their applications and are well within their rights to complain when things suddenly disappear – having to tell them "Facebook devs are working on a fix" loses the confidence clients have in us, yet we work so hard to build. Ultimately as you correctly state the knock on effect is we lose confidence in FB
Regards Tony
http://www.facebook.com/ifan.page.design
Comment by Tony Faria — March 23, 2010 @ 6:16 pm
I am fed up with, being knocked off, and many people are complaining about it, when playing poker, I got knocked off 5 times in an hour, not goood enough guys.
Comment by Facebook User — March 24, 2010 @ 4:57 am
This is a HUGE problem that they need to get fixed very soon. Apps rely on virility, and usually only get one chance to shine, so when all of our requests that have been sent by previous users get accepted and go to a dead app, we're screwed. Not only that, we get a bad rep as being "buggy" and unstable because all of the non-tech minded users dont grasp the fact that it's really Facebook's fault, and not ours.
Comment by Adam — March 24, 2010 @ 6:51 am
It is very difficult to have a serious business plan with these kind of risks.
Final users don't distinguish Application Developers with Facebook developers so it's very hard to explain them the source of failures and to have a Quality Reputation over such unrelible platform
Comment by Justin — March 24, 2010 @ 8:07 am
Facebook Connect has been nothing but a huge headache to deal with as a developer. Queries timeout or come back with bad responses half the time, the Terms of Service are truly draconian, and delivered value is questionable at best.
Comment by Kevin Olson — March 24, 2010 @ 8:52 am
Maybe it is time for Facebook to offer an SLA backed development platform that they charge for and apps have to be approved for. Not something that differentiates apps visually but something that can give people in the middle some recourse.
Comment by Carson McDonald — March 24, 2010 @ 10:01 am
This is definitely not just a platform issue, FB Connect apps are hugely impacted as well. In building the latest version of TweetPo.st, we had to devise an undocumented workaround for an API call that was broken for nearly 2 months with no acknowledgement from Facebook. And now, we are dealing with customer care issues that are the direct result of chronic failures in Facebook's Connect APIs. Like Tony says, our customers (in this case consumers) don't want to hear that it's Facebook's fault, they just want our app to work.
But I believe it goes deeper than these technical issues, which we see as the direct result of Facebook's apple-esque approach to developers as a captive audience. While Twitter openly acknowledges that the developer community is their differentiator, Facebook knows that hundreds of millions of consumers used their product before there was a platform (just like millions of people used the iPhone before there were apps). And it appears that at this point Facebook sees their platform as more of a revenue driver/nuisance to be managed like Apple does than an engagement driver like Twitter does. The developer relations people at Facebook with whom I've dealt are well-intentioned but severely under-staffed (see the conversation on this bug for one of the most conspicuous examples). The only platform-related department at Facebook that appears to be getting any funding at this point is the abuse team, who are enforcing the draconian developer terms Kevin references, and the payments team (go figure!).
Will we stop developing for Facebook? Of course not. But hopefully we can benefit from some of these issues long complained of in the developer community coming to more light in the mainstream.
Comment by Jonathan Strauss — March 24, 2010 @ 10:06 am
100% on the ball Jonathan. Even working with their corporate developer relations team was a nightmare. Endless ambiguity about what was and was not allowed, and numerous hollow promises about APIs/documentation that were "just down the road". If I never have to work with the Facebook platform again, it'll be too soon. Unfortunately with their large user base, inevitably I'll be subjected to it again.
Comment by Kevin Olson — March 24, 2010 @ 4:33 pm
I've only been an app developer for maybe six months but it's been supremely frustrating from day one.
From the pathetic wiki-based documentation (which is riddled with syntax errors) to methods that work one day and not the next, it's been the worst platform I've had to deal with in 13 years of development.
It's one thing to have a platform that places SO many restrictions on developers. But be consistent. Don't allow something to work today then "fix" it to not work tomorrow. Don't have examples of things in the wiki that simply don't work.
We've also been plagued by the "missing images" bugs that have been open since October. That's almost six months, people. There are only so many times we can explain to the client, "That worked yesterday. Facebook must've changed something overnight."
Clients are paying firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to build on this platform. And all that I'm sure of at this point is that Facebook doesn't care.
Comment by Andrew Jones — March 26, 2010 @ 10:34 am
For two days I havent even been able to get facebook to load up. I have revamp my laptop and reinstalled windows 7 and it still wont come up. Its very frustrating and I know alot of my friends and family are getting tired of it and leaving to go else where. I myself really dont want to do that when I play alot of the games that facebook has to offer especially Farmville. Is there any solutions in resolving this problem soon?
Comment by Misty — April 13, 2010 @ 10:25 pm
For two months facebook had been too 'complicated'. can this be still fix? return the applications of facebook before.
Comment by night raven — January 11, 2011 @ 8:45 pm