Why Facebook Shut Down the Only Useful App it Ever Had

I'm with Facebook on this one, users to some degree trust that their Facebook information isn't freely available on the web. Thats an integral part of their business model that the communication is only with friends. As most people find communication with friends to be more important than communication with others on the web i believe that facebooks business model is far superior to twitters and so there is no reason to change it.

Facebook always errs on the side of the publisher. Their guiding principle when it comes to user privacy is that if the publisher of some information doesn't want it to show up, or if they change their mind, applications must respect that preference immediately.

So, anyone who has worked in this space could've seen this coming a mile away. Anything that indexes even potentially private information, or makes it indexable by third parties, is inevitably going to be shut down.

After reading the headline, I was expecting something about the One True Courses App (federated applications destroyed Courses, since there are too many and no one knew which one to pick). I still miss making new connections with people in my college courses.

Facebook's new feed system has more features (privacy) than RSS, and therefor cannot be ported. It's really simple, but people still get all wound up about it. Twitter basically _is_ RSS, so it works great.

EDIT: You could have an authenticated feed, I suppose, but that's not what this app did.

I can not decide where I lay on this issue.

On one hand I love the ability to interact with facebook through apps such as Tweekdeck (which I can only assume uses this API?).

However, this API can be abused by sites to publish 'closed' information. If I create a strictly private profile so that all my status updates are displayed only to my confidants, I have an expectation of privacy. Say Bob is friends with me, however uses this API to publish all my assumedly private status updates to the world on his website www.watch-woodsiers-status-updates.com, without my knowing. Is that right?

You can read RSS along with Facebook's new stream (+Twitter, Flickr etc.) in my app, FriendBinder (http://friendbinder.com), I expect other apps will follow soon.

Though I wonder if I should be worried also, even though we don't re-share the data, they seem to be quite picky.

But why did they need to cache data to provide this service? The script that generates the RSS feed could have just queried the FB API and generated a feed on every load.