With FB cutting off viral channels, and cutting off social graph info, there are not many reasons to develop apps on their platform. It's their platform, they can do what they want with it, but I am not sure what the use case for it is anymore.
The added value of a FB login etc just dropped tremendously. And it's made devs wary of building on FB as you may get a notice that a year later your API permissions are getting revoked.
Did you ever find a solution to that by the way? I've had some ideas but they all require some manual actions. We're completely uninterested in the friends' data, we don't store it, it's only used for the individual user to allow him to perform an action at his own will (send a birthday card) and facilitate that. It's really too bad they clamped down on this one.
It seems it could have easily been solved by putting the friends' birthday permission behind an approval wall (which even the user birthday requires, you need to get your app approved by FB if you use it), and offering users (an already existing) the ability to turn off sharing of basic data with friends' apps. Especially when people have it on their public profile, if your data can be scraped publicly because the user makes it public, why restrict an API?
I'm one of those people that is very private about my data, but a lot of my users are 38 year old moms who share their date of birth (not necessarily year) with friends, and would love for them to send them a birthday card and couldn't care less if the day/month of their birth was somehow known to the world, while they're protected by a decent approval process and have the autonomy to turn off sharing.
As a developer, I feel they weren't as practical as they could have been here and there.
So for solutions, basically we did not find any. Just upgrading our app to FB 2.x was a challenge enough. We have compatible versions, but there is still about 50K Android users that have not upgraded, and basically when we do the switch the app will be 100% broken for them.
Yeah that sucks, those were my findings as well, was hoping someone had found some unique solution. I found one solution but it's a horrible UI experience (e.g. open a web view in an app, login the user, scrape the birthdays from their FB. Technically it's not super tricky but the steps for the user just scream 'scammy', so I'm not pursuing that.)
How's the contact list experience been like? I personally only have names & phone numbers there, an occasional email address but that's it. Do many of your users have birthdays listed in their contacts, too? I personally can't imagine filling in the birthday myself when creating a contact, wondering what the typical user does.
I actually found your app some months ago while doing research on how to make it work and was wondering what your trick was. But it seems it was just built using the old API!
I feel like the world needs a good way to send birthday cards to friends, someone is going to figure it out and we have a good shot at it.
We were on the old API for as long as possible. We made the switch a little ahead of schedule. So far it is going OK.
What app are you working on? Feel free to hit me up, my email is in my profile.
Someone needs to solve this problem. It isn't an easy one. Users want to use services that make it easy to manage data related to their contacts.
Whilst some apps are more shady than others with the use of this data, the bottom line is that it is a privacy attack by proxy.
Without some mechanism to get friends birthdays, this class of app just cannot exist.