July 16th, 2007
Should you trust Facebook with your users?
Inside Facebook has an interesting post detailing the affect a Facebook bug or partial outage can have on a Facebook application’s user numbers. When there are kinks in the Facebook Platform, to users it can often look like a problem with the third-party app itself. That’s because Facebook applications have to go through the social network’s own servers, presumably as a security measure.
Citing the example of Matches, a popular app that allows you to declare that you “have an interest in someone”, which lost 100,000 users after a Facebook bug affected their app, Inside Facebook warns:
Problems like these are expected on a platform as complex as Facebook’s, but they can still serve to illustrate the potential dangers of tying your software to such a young, monolithic environment. All your eggs are in Facebook’s basket so when they go down, you go down, too.
Although it’s in Facebook’s interest to foster a community and market around the platform, every single application is still at the mercy of Facebook’s stability.
While no one would argue that the risk of joining the Facebook eco-system is greater than relying on MySpace with its frequent widget blocks, despite being “open” (as ambiguous a term as that is), Facebook still gets to play gatekeeper, both from a technical and commercial point of view. Having said, it must be noted that, compared to MySpace’s handling of its unofficial widget “partners”, Facebook has done a great job at fostering and supporting its burgeoning developer community. Technically, despite the odd outage/bug here and there, they’ve also pulled off an impressive feat, scaling and launching the Facebook Platform remarkably smoothly.
Which brings me back to MySpace. With their recent suggestion that they now plan to open up through the provision of an API, I wonder if they’ll get the same trust from third-party developers. At times MySpace’s infastructure and codebase has seemed about as solid as quicksand. And this could be a major hinderance to turning MySpace into a platform to rival the new Facebook.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
