The unannounced updates to Facebooks social plugins | Hacker News Reader

The unannounced updates to Facebooks social plugins

klinger.io

24 pointstomazstolfa9 comments

So moving away from the future of web apps towards the dead-end of the closed and controlled Facebook-Internet. That looks scary to me.

Yes and no. I believe the social plugins as we see them currently are an inbetween step only.

But you are right - The big problem we have is that there is no other ID provider that really broke through to force players into an Open Web approach.

I get your point.

I was merely trying to express basically how I felt when I read the sample of code. It does not look like web development any more, just facebook-development.

> Every time you find one of those little gems your product owner brain goes all sparkly and happy, it jumps for joy and you see the future of the web unfolding in front of you.

That's the upside of the rollout process at Facebook, but the article completely ignores the downside which happens at the other end of an app lifecycle, when suddenly your app stops working because Facebook changed something, didn't document the change, and now you have no idea what went wrong or why and your users are screaming at the top of their lungs because they can't do what they used to be able to. That part of it doesn't make you sparkly and happy, let me tell you.

(In their defense, Facebook is getting better at documenting deprecations, but if you're at the bottom there's only one way to go...)

Completely agree. But fb platform improved a lot here. As you remember in 2008 we had to throw-away core parts ever 3 months. And stuff broke without any warnings or fallbacks.

I'm possibly missing something, but what's NOT documented here? Aren't these plugins on Facebook's documentation page (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/plugins/)?

On a sidenote, I HATE that a lot of tumblr blogs don't have comments sections. How do you interact with the blog owner in these cases?

Half of the mentioned plugins don't even work on the documentation/example pages. Not to be rude, but it's not surprising, with many of these apps being "(Beta)." I already consider most of Facebook's developer products to be Beta, and for them to mark a product as Beta, that can only be a signal to stay very far away.

It is quite common that facebook publishes documentation and API not at once. E.g. features go through a percentage launch process. I wouldn't consider them broken but "not yet published". Imho just expect this to happen in the next week and prepare your product roadmap if you want to use them.

Great article. Well done.

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