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Comment by ignifero | Hacker News Reader

We only have one social platform today worth building on, facebook. Let's hope this will change.

I think this could be huge. My experience with building on the FB platform has been so dramatically negative that I gave it up and really no longer trust them (I'll take a look at this new platform they're working on, of course) as a platform provider.

I think Google, with their track record of APIs and platforms like GAE, could really light a fire under them that'd be beneficial to everyone.

Unfortunately i rely on facebook for traffic. When i started, Dave Morin was in charge and things were looking good. Since then, we've only seen limitations constant changes, unenforced policies, things breaking etc etc. At this point it is indeed really in a bad shape, and a good reason may be that they don't feel any competition.

Yeah, the types of problems we had (I sort of wrote about it elsewhere[1]) were just totally inexplicable. I forget the precise specifics but one of them was something along the lines of things that would work one day but not the next, etc. Just really wild stuff that made me have no trust for the reliability of the platform.

Edit: The "best" part, if you follow that link, is that the project I mentioned that ended up cancelled would've had to be rewritten anyway now that FBML is on the way out.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693190

I'm curious to see whether they'll base their API on OpenSocial. After all, it is a Google-based "standard" that's seen updates right through late 2010. It would certainly give them an instant base of apps right from the start, and an obvious transition from iGoogle to Google+. They could however unceremoniously cut it off and come up with something new to replace it.

I am no fan of opensocial and i hope they have a simpler, rest-based api

There is an OpenSocial REST API which works pretty well, it's just that some SNs don't offer it, or at least they didn't early on. I haven't done any Facebook App development for about 2 years so I can't comment on the status quo, but back then, the FB API was definitely not better than OpenSocial.

That's why Google+ is important. Even if it doesn't take off, at least it keeps the 'check and balance' on Facebook's power in the social space, well with they hype it is getting now. Competition is good!

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