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Comment by revetkn | Hacker News Reader

Facebook API client author here (http://restfb.com). In my experience, you've got to be extremely careful/defensive when relying on anything from FB. Undocumented breaking changes are commonplace and no one on the FB side seems to care very much, possibly because they've got a de facto monopoly for the time being, or possibly because community notifications/documentation/etc. are boring next to sexy engineering problems.

Parroting the article, I know: unless your entire app is Facebook-centric, be careful of tightly locking it to FB. If you must tie yourself to FB, think long and hard about doing so first and if you proceed make sure you've got a mitigation plan in place if things go south.

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possibly because they've got a de facto monopoly for the time being

On what?

On "social networking", I guess. Just like with instant messaging, Facebook has a monopoly on social networking thanks to network effects. User join Facebook because all of their friends are already on Facebook, which leads to even more users joining Facebook.

Its the same scenario we saw with AIM in the instant messaging space. Lots of people were already on AIM (thanks to having AOL accounts), making AIM an attractive choice for new users. The trend was only broken when the AIM protocol (as well as those of other proprietary chat networks) was broken, allowing multi-protocol chat clients to bridge the gap between networks.

We're already seeing the same thing with social networks. Many clients support both Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to transparently bridge the gap between the two largest social media networks on the Internet.

Like quanticle said, social networking. You can't say, "fuck this, I'll just integrate with myspace instead" without getting laughed out of the room. Like it or not, Facebook's the only game in town.

Like quanticle said, social networking.

My problem is that is not a real thing which can be monopolized. I promise I'm not being (intentionally) obtuse here. I don't understand which piece of an online offering requires Facebook. Maybe an example would help me.

Specifically with respect to the OP, they have a gigantic datastore of their users' social graphs. That's a "real thing" that can be monopolized: their users' data.

I agree, there's nothing that requires facebook yet, and I hope developers realize the importance of keeping things that way, and stop integrating FB's services while there is still a choice.

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