Dear App Developers,
Please assist me in protesting Facebook's unprofessional attitude to pushing updates.
Facebook has a track record for pushing "improvements" that really screw up a lot of our apps. They do this without any warning and cause numerous problems for us developers.
When you have more than 50 million users, and 1000s of apps you can't just make changes all of a sudden without telling anyone and without thoroughly testing it. It's like if the PHP team all of a sudden said "Oh, by the way, we just changed some syntax yesterday. Hope you don't mind." I do mind, and I mind a lot.
Just recently Facebook pushed changes to their FBML parser which escapes a lot of content and HTML that it is not supposed to be escape. Tons of complaints have been filled on the forum, but Facebook still hasn't done anything:
http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=15701
http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=15676
http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=15671
Two of my apps (Rank My Profile and Secret Notes) were affected by this, and users of both apps are now having problems using certain features.
Facebook has got to learn to be more professional. There are numerous times when Facebook goes extremely slow, and when our app pages return 404 errors... and I know it's not my servers fault. I'm on Rackspace, and my server never goes down. Plus, when I refresh the page it immediately works... and I've heard similar stories of other developers who also have sporadic 404 error problems. Facebook gets about as much traffic, if not more on certain occasions than Google. I've almost never had problems with Google. I have never encountered any bugs on Google's systems, despite the fact that they are constantly in beta. I've had tons and tons of problems with Facebook though, especially their FBML/Developer Platform. They take for ever to deal with bugsÉ and many of these bugs are the result of pushing things that haven't really been tested.
Plus, you just don't push updates without telling anyone. FBML is almost a language like PHP or PerlÉ and I've never heard of the PHP or Perl team just making changes on the whim.
On June 12 and 13th, we will shut down our apps in protest.
Whenever problems occur with our apps, due to changes Facebook has silently pushed, our users complain to us, and think that we're to blame (when it's really Facebook's fault). Let's treat Facebook the way they've been treating us. We will tell users that the downtime is Facebook's fault, which in a way it defiantly is.
Sincerely,
Venkat Koduru (MyFriendWeb.com)