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“but don’t you get your hopes up high” | a blog by cody simms

Facebook’s F8: It’s all in the execution

Just like every other person in the online media world, I’ve been pretty excited by Facebook’s announcement yesterday of their F8 development platform (great coverage of many of the apps by Mashable).

But I’ve spent the last hour this morning testing out some apps. And so far I’m oh-for-five. Hopefully it is just a post launch glitch in the Facebook API somewhere?

Here are my experiences so far, in chronological order of my disappointment. Note that these reviews represent my experiences with the third-party service within the Facebook interface. The apps are surely working just fine on their own standalone websites, to which I’ve linked:

  • iLike: “We’re taking a short time-out for maintenance”
  • Flixster: “No search results for ‘Wonderboys’”
  • MOG: My Last Songs Played: “The following disk images failed to mount: MOG-O-MATIC.dmg. Reason: corrupt image”
  • Causes: Project-Agape: “We apologize, but there was an error processing your credit card. Please make sure that all the information is correct and try again.” (Message received upon trying to donate $10 to Teach For America. I tried two different credit cards.)
  • Twitter: (Entered a status update through the Facebook interface but it did not appear on my Twitter profile or go out to my Twitter friends via SMS as far as I know).

MOG application failure

Come on Facebook; I really love the openness of your strategy. But it doesn’t do much good if that actual apps that developers submit don’t work properly. Maybe you are just having a bad morning due to all of the traffic and attention, and it is affecting all of these apps. I’ll try to give you (and each of the above application developers) the benefit of the doubt for now, because I really want this openness thing to catch on!


This entry was posted on May 25th, 2007 and is filed under Internet and Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.

 
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4 Responses to “Facebook’s F8: It’s all in the execution”

  1. Jared Hanson
    25. May 2007 at 09:40

    Yep, I’m having the same troubles. The applications I’ve been attempting to use don’t seem to be responding. Often times, nothing displays on the canvas.

    I’m excited about The Platform and the capabilities that have been announced. Hopefully Facebook can iron out these launch issues.

  2. Cody Simms
    25. May 2007 at 09:44

    Jared,
    Thanks for pointing out the blank canvas issue. I’ve also been getting that quite a bit too.

    Facebook, we’re all hoping you can get these things sorted.

  3. Jonathan Strauss
    25. May 2007 at 15:35

    I’ve only really tried Twitter so far. And with the performance problems they have on their own site, I just assumed the issues were on Twitter’s end. Add the Twitter cat with whatever’s tinkering in Facebook platform’s servers to get one poor first-time user experience.

    Also, and I’m not sure if this is a feature or a bug, I’ve noticed that only the tweets I send from the Facebook Twitter show up in my main Facebook profile. If that’s indeed as designed, I dub it the wackness.

  4. Sam
    26. May 2007 at 13:42

    Yep, tried the mog one and it keeps crashing. I’m on windows, so it sucks on all platforms.

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