F8 - a developer’s wild west
The FB site has been down this morning, from around 6:30am PST according to my logs, so going over 2 hrs now. I’m suspecting a DOS attack related to the platform changes, discovered around the valley yesterday. I have no evidence for that at all. I did notice that the developers documentation pages went down shortly after the stories hit valley way for a few hours.
20070629 9:28:56|error|219|acting
20070629 9:28:57|error|219|home:total:a:1:{s:5:"total";s:4:"8708";}
20070629 12:08:38|error|217|acting
20070629 12:09:10|error|217|acting
Some developers are vocally upset, since their weeks of feverish work are less likely to hit wide adoption. As invites go 10/day vs all right now is a tectonic shift - from very likely to explode to may grow quickly. Users will need motivation to go back and invite.
Why? Because the high early adoptions of the initial apps didn’t result in high usage or great satisfaction. Not a huge surprise, because the first of anything is rarely great, and applications will mature and improve.
So now, only 10 people per day will get to shout that your app is great, which will benefit the tone of the entire app process. It’s unfortunate that the early movers got such an advantage, and that there will be intertia against uninstalls - so basically they have an open window to make their apps effective at retaining users and building daily usage.. which is exactly what facebook wants them to be doing.
I am Green has been growing steadily, even with notifications down for 2 days, and without invites. So I’ll just be happy knowing those work even a little bit.
I’m upset about how this was (not) communicated though. I spent at least 6 hrs over the last two days fixing and fixing a bug in my invite system which wasn’t a bug.. it was the new way. Similarly, if notifications are down (and i haven’t received any in two days) that deserves a posting to some developer rss feed, so I don’t wonder what I did wrong. FB should give app developers more love, just as ebay did to power users. We’re energentic, grateful, and passionate, and there are 69,791 of us.
