Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I use Facebook and I don't think that's going to change any time soon, but I also used to develop against the Facebook API. I say "used to" because there is nothing of value to get from the Facebook API anymore. Their data is now entirely locked into Facebook and cannot be easily moved.

My site pulled local event data into an event calendar, since Facebook's discovery of truly local events is shitty at best and useless most of the time. These are all public events at businesses open to the public and the businesses want more people to come. But now Facebook considers public events posted by public-welcoming businesses to be too sensitive of information to share, and that API disappeared overnight in April, with no advance warning and no ability to get it back. It's gone. Completely gone.

Coincidentally, they now have their own app called Facebook Local that shows events near you. I'm sure that has nothing to do with them shutting down that API.

Break up Facebook.

Didn't Facebook just get yelled at by everyone for having too much information available via the API? I don't think it's fair to be upset that they started to lock down their APIs after that issue.

Too much information that should not have been available, yes. It's hard to argue that reading public event information published on public pages that even people who do not have Facebook accounts can see would be considered "too much information".

Their response was more "oh you don't want your friends list to be public information? how about we shut down everything?"

Too much information about people, yes.

Business tend to want the kind of information your comment's parent was bemoaning being siloed up broadly available. People tend not to want their personal details treated that way.

FB locking that info away isn't about protecting those businesses; it's about protecting their own position in the market.

EDIT: Explain to me, then, how Facebook "protecting" info businesses want widely disseminated is in anyone but Facebook's interest. If I have a coffee shop, and we're having an event, I don't just want FB users knowing about it, do I?

Treating this as a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" is disingenuously specious.

The problem is that if you wanted to gather all the publicly available info on businesses, you had to write a very complex piece of software to do it (screen scrapers + web crawling).

But Facebook wrapped that all up into a tidy APi. You can gather information about the world for a nominal amount. The Russians did it for a couple hundred grand.

It’s not about what the Facebook API serves, but about the ease of use and scope of information. There’s a reason Google Maps delays satellite imagery by years, we need the same when it comes to other forms of global data.

Can you explain how this is responsive to the question of whose interest siloing this information serves?

If I want to take on the complexity of aggregating it, that's my choice. Facebook isn't doing me some kind of favor by "helping" me not fall down that rabbit-hole...

Sure, they silo’d it to protect national interests. Which in a way, protects Facebook interests because countries would ban them if they didn’t take action on this.

If you want to take on that complexity, go for it. Facebook was never trying to help you with that.

Yoga Night at the Brewery is not a national security concern and you know it.

Google's imagery updates can be mighty slow, but it's not because they are delaying the imagery by years. Last year they did an update of northern California within a few weeks of the fires in Santa Rosa which included the fire damage.

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