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Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

It's been a crazy 36 hours since I last posted here about my weekend project. This morning, I woke up to an email from Facebook Platform, saying that the application has gotten disabled.

Full text of the email is at http://lts.cr/PRh

I'm not using stream.publish, and I'm checking for updates as little as possible. Also, it seems it was deleted from my apps...so they didn't just disable it. It's gone for good.

I may open source the code, if anyone wants to run copies. Let me know.

Update 1: I just messaged Zuck, hopefully he can respond with some more details.

Update 2: I tried to appeal the decision using Facebook's little form (http://www.facebook.com/help?faq=17553), but it wouldn't go through for my account. My friend tried it, and it worked. Don't really know what to think about that...

Update 3: Maybe this is a Harvard v Yale thing?

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So they didn't even give you any notice, just "boom you're gone"? Disappointing.

Some of the suggestions in "How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech" might be helpful -- http://www.talesfromthe.net/blog/?p=28

Nope, zero notice. It was basically "Poof!" and then the app wouldn't work. Doubly annoying since I was sleeping when it was deactivated (4am PST).

"Zero notice" seems to be a common thing at Facebook. Same happened with my personal account, just gone one day.

To be fair, I guess it was because I didn't have my real name on it but it was the name my blog readers know me by. Several thousands of friends - gone, without a warning.

I currently have about 15 different Facebook accounts, each under false names. So far none of them have been shut down, or even questioned. Maybe it was because you got to such a high amount of friends that they took notice, mine are rather low, around 50 - 100 friends on each account...

Probably. Or your 'false names' are not as 'flashy' as mine! I still thought it was quite harsh to just delete the account without any warning or notice at all.

And I've got a lot of friends who aren't using their real names either and are getting away with it, no idea how they are tracking you down.

Insisting on real names is a big part of what makes Facebook so uncool and corporate to me. I want the Myspace days back, seriously. They didn't care at all.

A lot of people on my list have completely preposterous names that are clearly not real. I've changed mine many times to many stupid things and never had a problem.

Let's hope you get busted for missing the whole point of facebook and are quickly removed.

Honestly, how gutless can you be? Quite the charades you got going there, congrats! If that's what interests you...

missing the whole point of facebook

That depends on if you consider the point of facebook to give detailed, accurate biographical data about yourself away to a company with which you have no monetary relationship, so that this company can then sell it, or not.

It seems, based on the excerpt in the article and the timing, that it may have been hit by an automatic kill/flag type situation.

They could at least have sent a Breakup Notification. It only there were an app for that ...

I wouldn't be surprised if facebook just "borrows" the idea and implements it on their own. They would have a significant advantage due to the lack of API restrictions.

Neither would I. And they'd be within their rights to do it: a good idea is a good idea, regardless of whence it came.

I wouldn't say that's why it was shut down but facebook data gurus must be intimately aware of stalking as a huge traffic driver and this app tapped directly into that vein. I think other people have already mentioned this application siphoning traffic from their main user landing pages and that's probably why it was shut down.

I think FB would get some bad press if they offered a feature like this directly. Not for screwing over a developer (nobody but other developers care about that), but for the privacy violation/stalking feel the whole thing has.

You say that as if bad press or privacy concerns have had any impact on Facebook thus far.

Are you serious? Beacon is gone. When the privacy stuff was hitting the fan, they designed/engineered a totally new privacy console in a week.

They ignore bad press and privacy concerns in order to move the project forward in major ways. Like adding News Feeds, or allowing entirely classes of API interaction (Beacon). They don't do it for little features like breakup notifications.

Could it work as a browser plugin? And more generally, isn't it nearly impossible for FB or any other website to prevent plugins from accessing data as if they were the user?

This was my first thought after reading the title of this thread. Let your users fetch the data for you!

I find it funny that Facebook can be used as a resource for conducting a political revolution, yet they kill this.

A revolution is way less creepy.

They have an advertising model. People who organize political revolts log in and see Che's t-shirts for sale on the right side of the page.

Checking status automatically takes away some incentive from users from logging-on, there by less money for fb. Hence the shut-down.

Somebody else posted a project where they were going to create an app so that people could interact with fb through their email? If that takes off, expect it to be shut-down as well.

For what it is worth at this point, I heard Breakup Notifier mentioned on a nationally syndicated morning radio show (http://www.elvisduran.com/main.html) while driving to work yesterday (locally it was on Z100 in NYC). A belated congrats!

Would love to see your example of scaling a Facebook app on Appengine if you choose to open source.

To others interested, Facebook has a pretty good tutorial/demo app: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/samples/canvas/

"and I'm checking for updates as little as possible." - per user though. Did the gigantic and sudden success of the app perhaps throw out some red flags? It could have been a legitimate automated response by the Facebook system because it wasn't exactly the normal growth rate for an application.

Sure, but that would make sense if they just disabled the application and informed that there was a problem. According to the creator it seems not only was it shut down, but completely deleted.

Although your app was an awesome piece of tech, did it come to your mind that they may have disabled it only because it's slightly disrespectful towards people? I mean there are real people behind every FB face, and a breakup can be sad or painful. Maybe for an undetermined percentage of the population, the effect of breakup notifier may be like a knife in the chest?

More disrespectful than FB leaking out your entire profile and friend list to every single FB game developer and their third-party ad providers? I'm doubtful that "respect" of users plays a role here, or in FB decisions at all.

The email also says "take user feedback [...] into account". So perhaps the automated system isn't that automated after all.

And frankly, I am not surprised if Facebook isn't comfortable having this app around. If someone finds an exploit, and a "who has a secret crush on who" database gets out, that's a pretty major PR-disaster for Facebook. Non tech-savy Average Joe won't care that it wasn't Facebook's fault.

All you have, as a FB app, are a bunch of UIDs though. Not impregnable security, but stealing that data still puts you a long way from being able to say "Joe as a secret crush on Jane".

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