Facebook screws app developers on notifications
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I don't think that it's a great idea to build a business model that relies on Facebook - but at some stages of developing an app it is very useful to use Facebook facilities to implement a social graph and notifications, so that you don't have to.
They're willing (and smart) to leverage independent efforts where they assist this. But... only so long as they do.
Look at it from this perspective: If a functionality becomes important, would they not be "derelict" in their duty not to attempt to bring it under their control? In-house, acquisition, whatever.
If you choose to help them out, they're not going to say no. But you should keep the balance of power in such a relationship in mind.
Correction: it's a bad idea to build a business model that relies on screwing Facebook, on Facebook's platform.
One of Facebook's priorities is keeping its users engaged and happy - invite-heavy, spammy apps run directly contrary to that goal (in a very egregious, very serious way). It is no surprise that Facebook slammed that door shut.
This is generalizable to: if you are reliant on a third party platform and your interests are aligned against the interests of the platform, you will fail.
Engaged, yes. Happy, bullshit. Facebook ignores its users and abuses them far more regularly than most other companies. Anecdotally, everyone I know hates facebook and wants an alternative that has active users. By numbers, Facebook was the last in brand satisfaction for its market in 2011[1], although ACSI appears to have died since then. I strongly suspect the reason facebook restricted notifications was because they weren't making enough money to offset e.g. disabling of notifications.
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[1]: http://news.yahoo.com/acsi-facebooks-consumer-satisfaction-s...
Also, it's not like they have carefully selected the group of friends that they want! The ones I have seen just have a "Send to all friends" tickbox.
Create something people actually want and you won't have to spend your life trying to exploit every possible loophole in Facebook's system.
The problem is that creating something that people actually want, working via the channels that Facebook provides for people to access the Social Graph is very risky, as they can move the goalposts at any point.
So many new apps launch that banning notifications by app gets tedious. They all suck in different groups of your friends, so banning notifications by friends is tedious. Not forever, perhaps, but long enough to make you think ill of Facebook.
We've been there before, and even though as a developer I miss it, it was the right thing of Facebook to do.
I work on Facebook Platform. We never "turned off the Requests functionality for apps that are not labelled as games, breaking many live apps." We never turned off requests. We never broke a single app.
What we did do was test the impact of issuing a notification for a new app request for several categories of apps. The sending and delivering of requests still worked through this test and nothing broke. Users could still send requests and they could receive them on Facebook.
The key thing to bear in mind is that our APIs often express "intent", not specific UX actions on Facebook.com or our mobile apps. We are always testing new user experiences to see what the best experience is for a given intent from an app. Such was the case with this test.
Again, no apps were broken, we were simply testing if/when/how we should surface notifications for app requests to users.
We have concluded this particular set of tests and if we are going to make some permanent changes, we will make sure to inform our developer community.
It's a very frustrating position to be in. I can understand why you need to test, and the arguments in favour of preventing spam.
It does seem that when you play by (what you think are) the rules you can get screwed, as others take advantage of the system. It's been a very frustrating few days!
Nobody who has any clue what they're doing is relying on those notifications getting through en masse now, at least not without a contract with Facebook.
Meanwhile, Dr. Oz has a diet he'd like you to go on...click here to change your life.
I'm surprised anybody is still surprised when Facebook changes its rules without warning.
This goes for using any platform. Look at the apps developed using the Twitter platform. This is one reason I've been trying to work on other ideas for a business, or to do my own crawling, for unscatter.com. Using API's from another company is always going to be a product risk.
They all present massive opportunities to reach and interact with users/customers/clients... but unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you should know this kind of thing can and DOES happen.
This shouldn't and won't stop most people from building services on top of these platforms, but at this point you either know this is a risk and accept/plan for it, or you don't know this, which means you do not have an adequate understanding of the infrastructure you are depending on.
We had planned to use Facebook-only for the first phase of the app - as it has a prebuilt social graph, friend model, and notifications system. Easy to use, and with a large base of users.
I guess my point is that even if you think you have taken a calculated risk (90 days breaking changes), the companies can find a way to mess up your plans anyway!
This is totally different to how things used to be done back in the desktop software era.... oh wait... oops.
P.s it sucks to be small and at the mercy of big boys
It sucks to be small and at the mercy of app developer spam.
Maybe it's time to create real products rather than just exploit the Facebook API to spread garbage?