Facebook: We Are Your Clients
January 17, 2008
Throughout all of yesterday, Facebook application developers experienced a great deal of application downtime. Many of the users experienced nearly 24 hours of downtime, while some are still encountering issues now, almost 36 hours later. After problems began to arise, more and more third party developers flooded the developer forums seeking information as they noticed issues with their applications. Despite the overwhelming concern from these developers, nothing was heard from the Facebook Platform team for approximately 8 hours, at which point the official “Facebook Platform Team” forum member simply stated that issues should be reported in the bug tracker.
This level of response has been somewhat of a trend with Facebook Platform support in the past, but it has become especially clear after how things were handled from the perspective of the public eye yesterday. The driving factor that pushed me into writing this article was a response from the Facebook Platform team regarding a comment that I made on the bug tracker. My comment stated the following.
Any updates from Facebook would be appreciated…this error’s been going on for about 4 hours with no input from Facebook, which unfortunately says a lot about the professionalism of those involved.
As it turns out, the issue had been happening for quite a bit longer than 4 hours at the time I submitted that post to the bug tracker. While my comment may have been a bit biting in the way I presented it, the heart of my point stands the same: developers are left in the dark wondering what’s going on, feeling as if there is no positive response from those who can do something to help.
Almost 24 hours (and an astounding 38 developer posts to the bug tracker) later, Matthew Welty provided a response, which includes the following.
First off, my apologies to Matt Huggins who seemed to take our lack of implicit response as an indication that our engineers were not working to the resolve the issue. Indeed, we were so intent upon resolving the issue that we didn’t want to sacrifice the time it would take to post the board and opted for our developer support team to acknowledge and field your questions and concerns.
Welty’s response unfortunately further supports the problem that the developer community is attempting to make clear. On top of the concern that developers’ applications were not working, the lack of response was the next biggest concern in the eyes of the community. And while it is appreciated that Facebook was working their hardest to resolve the issue, the problem is that this was not known at the given time, when it was most important to the community.
If the Facebook Platform intends to continuing growing further, they need to consider the developer community to be their “clients”. Any time a business has something critical happen that impacts their clients, the first response step they’re supposed to take is to get in touch with the clients to inform them that they’re working on it. Once things are all clear, the business is supposed to update the clients on the status, providing an explanation of what happened and how they will avoid it in the future. If resolving the issue takes longer than expected, periodic updates are provided.
Simply taking the first step of letting us know what is occurring when future issues arise will greatly ease the concerns of those who support and represent your platform.
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6 Responses to “Facebook: We Are Your Clients”
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Matt,
I agree entirely, having also posted on the forum yesterday and again today. Facebook are cruising on a wave of techie euphoria, marvelling at their own value, and yet are only in the priviledged position they find themselves in because their platform has been adopted by not only college kids but also larger corporations who have seen potential in Facebook as a platform for viral campaigns.
Developers like myself have had the opportunity to work for agencies and clients alike, producing applications to promote their businesses or products.
Try explaining to these organisations that the part of the application that worked this afternoon won’t work in the evening because the US is online and Facebook clearly cannot cope!
If the Facebook platform cannot be stabilised and Facebook support can’t become professional enough to provide a platform suitable for such applications, it will simply become a place for script-kiddies and hobby development. The larger clients will take their work away, developers and agencies will turn their heads back to other types of campaign and I, amongst others, will spend more of my time on Flash development again.
The end result of this turning away from Facebook will be that the value of Facebook as a platform will initially stagnate, and then drop.
There is huge potential for Facebook. To make the most of it, however, they need to get their act together.
I’d also like to hear from Facebook what they are planning to due about these issues.
1. Promoting your application via Social Ads is pushed heavily on Facebook. There’s an advertise link in the developer app for live apps and it’s one of the main options when setting up an ad using Social Ads. When the platform goes down, Social Ads keep running, keep counting clicks, and you get charged. I’ve asked for refunds on clicks during down time in the past citing official status updates from Facebook referencing the down time and the reply “No refunds will be given”. Ouch! Needless to say, I haven’t spent 1 cent since - enjoy the dating ads.
2. Facebook still passes their platform downtime off on the developers. For the first time in nearly 2 months we had more removes of our application than adds because users thought our application was broken!
3. Traffic dropped 28% due to the downtime yesterday after days of growth.
4. Invitation limitations (20 per day per user) make momentum incredibly important and this kills it in two ways 1) loss of invitations being sent out during down time and 2) missed conversion on people accepting invitations during down time.
5. This hurts the applications that play by the rules the most. It’s harder to build momentum and every app user counts. These issues are some of the reasons why people are resorting to spam and mis-leading tactics. If one of my users wants to invite 50 of his friends to the app, why shouldn’t he be able to? You can spam all of your friends with group and event invitations, is that not the same? (assuming you’re using the Facebook FBML, which doesn’t pre-check / mis-lead)
That’s my 5 cents… I was hoping we got passed this in November and again when all sent invitations were completely lost late last year.
Communication is only half the problem, when is Facebook going to address the problems created above?
Mike
For the past two days i have been checking out if there is any form of update from facebook stating that the problem has been resolved but nothing yet from them, my apps was setup to run simultaneously with a major event which is due to kick off on sunday, now i can’t invite users to the apps, i have since stopped my social ads bcos i can’t afford to waste my money. Even if the problem is fixed i wonder if i will be able to gather d same momentum when d apps was initially launched.
I believe if such problems occur,facebook should send out an email notifying all developers of such problem, when d problem started i didn’t get to know until d next day, i was busy switching servers thinking they were the problem,i hosted new domains transferring d apps there thinking that was d problem but no everything was d same until i checked out d forum n found out most ppl were complaining of d same thing.
I also want to know why some apps r working and apps like mine keep giving d silly errors?
Yesterday on 4th February for 24 hours, our app was down, on bug reported on bugzilla… i get this answer…
“Please try checking your app settings in the developer app and check in the
forums for other help on getting it set up properly. It looks like certain
settings aren’t inputted correctly.”
And today morning it started working without touching our app at all, and it is “Facebook Miracle”, 24 hours down and suddenely Jesus of Facebook comes and makes your app alive !!!
What an irresponsible answer !!!
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Can someone tell me when this will be fixed.
Pamela Hey
In name field is my FB email address is my married name address…i have been locked out of my Fb due to my acct being used for a scam and I have since gotten it all worked out with Yahoo and have been tring to get BACK into my FB acct. I’ve done everything the FB site told me to do.. I know you are all busy but I really miss my FB Please help me with this problem…