AlexHopmann.com

FBCal is one of the most useful Facebook apps yet. It just creates an iCal feed from your friends birthdays and/or your events in Facebook. You can subscribe in iCal, Windows Calendar or Outlook. Slick, and very useful.

Facebook has some really nice developer pages that let you track the stats of your application. They show you total users, active users each day, daily adds, removes, blocks, and more.

The only catch is that the stats appear to be wrong half the time which limits their usefulness quite a bit. At DeepRockDrive our “daily active users” is frequently LOWER than our daily application adds.

Even worse the total user count which should be a pretty easy statistic swings wildly all over the place. On Tuesday it said we had about 15,000 users. On Wednesday morning it was reporting over 20,000 users, but only about 1,000 new ones??? And today its down to 12,000. From some other stats I suspect the 15,000 number is the closest to reality, but it does undercut my confidence in the overall stats.

Facebook just announced Facebook Connect which lets you use Facebook to authenticate on your own site. Except that, uh, its already possible to do that with the existing Facebook APIs, although other than our implementation at DeepRockDrive I haven’t seen many other sites do this. I suppose the Connect stuff makes the approach a bit more smooth and supports it more officially, but its all there already.

For us supporting Facebook authentication was a no-brainer. We care about getting a ton of people to our site to see our cool interactive shows. If we can skip a whole registration process and all that mess and have them just click the Facebook icon, and it works, perfect.

It is great to see Facebook taking some measures to reduce spam. Since I’ve been working on some Facebook (and related) type things lately I think about these issues a lot.

The deeper issue is that the Facebook app authors are taking this “land grab” “get rich quick” approach. Except they aren’t getting rich, they are getting “users” that when abused have no value.

My favorite latest example is Social.IM. This looked like a very cool thing- its an IM application that is integrated with Facebook so it automatically knows my Friends List from Facebook. This is a perfect example of the kind of application that really leverages the social networks knowledge of my interactions with others, while providing a useful function. If this app worked well, it would quickly be my main IM client.

But its currently on the road to being deleted from my machine for two reasons. The first is just that the client is not done very well. The chat flickers a ton, every time you type it jumps the whole window, and it has a huge block for every line you type with your user tile. After GTalk shipped, it felt like there was a new standard for the baseline experience in IM, and these guys are far from that to the point where using it is annoying.

But the worse problem is that they try to abuse me to spam my friends to install their thing. The saddest part here is they don’t even need to- when I’m running the app I have a list of my friends, those who are running Social.IM and those who aren’t. If I want to talk to one of those that are not running it, I can click on their name and invite them. Great.

Why do they pester me to invite a bunch of people when I first sign up too? Completely unnecessary- your sign up experience should get people into your app as quickly as possible without that kind of hassle. Then I’m chatting with someone and playing with the smiley’s. They have some funny bigger ones, and I click on one to my shock my browser opens-

They want me to spam my friends to unlock some damn smiley’s? This is classic “abuse your customers” stuff and I’d thought it had gone out of fashion a few years ago but Social.IM has brought it back. Social.IM is going on my “ban” list until they cut this crap out.

Hopefully as people figure out how to make Facebook stuff sucesful, they will focus on customer value, great experiences, and making the social aspects (invites, news feeds, etc) tied to relevant things (like I want to chat with you) rather than spam.

I’m getting increasingly annoyed by all the crap Facebook apps that constantly spam me. But the most egregious abuse is that most of these apps are more focused on spamming invitations rather than providing useful features.

Why do half the actions not provide any useful information in the news feed, instead making me click on it? Because then they make my add their stupid application, and invite other people just to see what someone actually did. Facebook authors are more busy being viral than providing useful service which is a bad trajectory.

To be fair, its not a new thing. Evite is a example of the worst of this. When you receive Evite messages they typically don’t have the useful information in the email, like when and where the invitation is for. They are stuck in a business model where they are so focused on driving traffic to their web site and to their ads that they annoy you to death.

My buddies at Jackson Fish Market have introduced Invitatistc which takes this problem head on. Its simple, doesn’t do wacky stuff, but its useful and doesn’t have to beat you over the head. I’m hoping they are right with their bet and that people will realize that you want to use a service more if it focuses on adding value rather than scamming you. I’m assuming Facebook apps will realize this too- I just noticed several things in my feed that were more useful- for example in the past it always said “John Doe has asked a question” and now it appears to be including the question in the news feed which is a big improvement.

Today I check the app I’ve been building and I get a spew of dozens of errors-

CSS Error (line 0 char 113): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.
CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.
CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.
CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.

I’m pretty sure its the way I’m setting the margin property which is valid CSS, but might not be the precise syntax they are expecting-
<div style=”margin: 10px 20px 0px 20px;”>

This goes back to the point that they can change the platform and how they parse FBML at any time and without warning break you. I wish they provided a “staging” server. The idea is that you can develop your app there, test it there, and any platform changes they do get rolled out at the staging server for at least a week before the move them to production (except of course for any fixes to exploits). This at least would give developers a fighting change of staying on top of this stuff.

The other big issue this brings up is the perception of the cause of the problem. I’ll give the Facebook folks some credit for using fairly neutral language in their text, but the implication is still that the problem is with the app developer. TechCrunch just ran a piece on Facebook apps and how many of them are failing to scale. Of course, the catch is that while many of these apps might be done by some non-professional folks on a shared hosting server that can’t handle the load, that is not necessarily the real story.

My app is running on a dedicated machine in a datacenter. The machine is a fairly high performance dual-core machine that is typically running at less than 5% usage. My uptime as recorded by various tools has been 99.86% for the past 8 months (with pretty much 99.99% for the past 3-4 months). I can hit my site directly and I never get a failed request. Yet when accessing my Facebook apps on the same machine I see the same error messages that TechCrunch is attributing to poorly designed unscalable apps.

There are lots of possible explinations. It could be a bug in the code of my app where it hangs somehow. Unlikely, but its possible. It could be a complex interaction in Facebook calling my server and then my server making callbacks to Facebook to server the request. But in any case something is turning out to be less than commercial-quality reliability and it doesn’t feel like its in my control.

Makes you think twice about exposing your brand to these kind of issues. I’m planning on following up with some other developers I know to see if they are encountering the same sort of things.

I’m continuing to use Launch21’s blog as a place to put posts that are more directly about writing code. Since I’ve been working with the Facebook platform late at night the past week I’m working on a set of posts on working with the Facebook APIs. They are all pretty new so there aren’t many resources yet on the Internet to help out so check it out if you are interested. My latest post is about FBML vs. IFrames for Facebook applications.

I’ve been playing with building apps for Facebook the last few days. Mostly it is going pretty well, but there are a couple of little issues I’ve been struggling with. I’ve noticed via email and comments that some of my posts about technical problems I’ve faced and solutions have been the most popular, so I’m going to try to keep up a good flow of these.

Their documentation doesn’t really have step-by-step explanations of what happens over the wire yet. I think all the details are there somewhere, but it took reading the PHP sources to fix some issue with the app I was building in .NET. The big issue is that the example sources showed doing a redirect when a user is first connecting to your app and hasn’t authenticated yet. However if the user is accessing you in the “canvas” (IE- inside Facebook), a normal HTTP redirect is NOT the right thing to do. Instead you need to return the FBML for a redirect-

Response.Write(”<fb:redirect url=’http://www.facebook.com/login.php?api_key=” + AppAPIKey + @”&v=1.0′/>”);

Another issue I hit is that it feels like I really need two accounts to test my application and its interaction with other users. I have not gotten notifications to work yet. The catch with this is there is a checkbox that hides your application from people other than yourself while you are developing it (’developer mode’). But while that checkbox is checked, my second account can’t access the app. So this is a bit of a catch-22.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that Facebook won’t let me be signed in from more than one computer at a time. I typically am using 2-4 computers at once and really appreciate that most of the Google sites, GTalk, and others let me be signed in all over and they just work. Its a real pain when testing stuff that whenever I use a different computer to access Facebook it makes me sign in again.