The elephant in the room here is that this was announced at F8 - a conference for platform developers - yet this platform application was developed internally and is one that, because of the neutering of the API, no outside developer could have built. They essentially said “hey developers, look at this neat thing we built that you can’t!”.

I’m curious what the point of F8 actually is at this stage. The platform has become so restricted that social apps can’t be built anymore. Facebook should just acknowledge that outside developers have outlived their usefulness now that they have helped the service attract 2 billion users, and scrap the conference.