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Comment by djyaz1200 | Hacker News Reader

"Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them." -amen! Their big screw up is not supporting a vibrant market for apps. Zuck says he wants "to be electricty" but it seems he also wants to tightly control what is plugged in and how it's used. How come I can't access messenger with a 3rd party app? Why can't all kinds of cool startups build their business on the FB "platform"? Why not be more open, when Apple allowed Google Voice in the App Store all the carriers had to hasten their move to data based pricing... it was a revolution but Apple allowed it. Facebook will not ever let their power, position or business model be challenged by apps in any serious way.

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> Zuck says he wants "to be electricty" but it seems he also wants to tightly control what is plugged in and how it's used.

So really he wants to be AT&T circa 1965. Nice work if you can get it.

> How come I can't access messenger with a 3rd party app?

Can't you? Adium claims it supports FB: https://adium.im/

The real question is whether I can access and present a Facebook newsfeed via 3rd party application. For example: Can I create a "1337h4x0rbook.io" that contains a hacker-focused social network, but feeds / filters based on things that are tech-y.

Can I?

Should be possible with FQL I think? Just query the stream table.

FQL has been deprecated since Graph API v2.1 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_1), and will only be usable with <=v2.0 apps until October 30th 2016 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog).

The Graph API has not longer the ability to retrieve the /home endpoint which contained the newsfeed, since v2.0. The only this a app can retrieve is the user's own posts.

The graph API has a feeds and posts endpoint that gives you the posts from any public Facebook page

A lot of groups with significant utility are private - e.g. groups surrounding car part sales

And users can remove themselves from the group's feed provided by the Graph API, even if the group is public.

This is the choice of the group so, of course, the content is not publically available via API. If a user logs in to your app with facebook credentials, you can access private group contents via API.

What's the problem here?

this is not the choice of the public group... any user of a public group can choose to have their data not available when someones query the API of that public group...

It used to work with Jabber, it doesn't work now.

It still works with XMPP. I'm connected with bitlbee right now.

Stopped working with Pidgin for me, switched to Trillian and it works fine. Caveats being it doesn't work with messages that include links and also group messages. 99% of cases it's fine.

As soon as your software becomes a platform your ad revenues disappear. See: Twitter.

Twitter is a full step worse to developers than FB is. Sure it's rough for Zynga, but can you name anyone who's built a real business on top of twitter?

buffer

bit.ly

Hootsuite

A lot of companies have, and then Twitter shut down their access. Twitter is the poster child for "Don't build software in another company's backyard."

Great example: Datasift.

Tweetbot

Klout, and they were never shut out.

paper.li

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