Interesting announcement from Blogfriends creators about their Facebook app.
At the same time, the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.
What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.
This is a common reason given by Telcos as to why they don’t want to mash-up their 99.999% reliable services with these 3rd party platforms (I guess less than 99.999% reliable), subject to the whims of perpetual-beta API fixers!
It’s a fair comment, but welcome to the world of mash-ups. However, if a small Web 2.0 house can’t keep up, then that’s a different story. Of course, we don’t know how much API changes brought this project to its knees, but it’s a possible question mark over Facebook as a platform. I guess I wouldn’t build a whole service around FB anyway. The challenge is using it to bring traffic to your site.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Troy Tinnes // Apr 2, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Paul,
I guess it works in some respect. I got to this site by clicking the link on your FB page
Perhaps the secret when designing an app to hook into the social media sites is to design an adapter first. Its extra work, but may save work in the long run - and if created well enough, the adapter can be expanded to hit other social media apps that are catching on to the FB model.
2 Paul G // Apr 2, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Good points. No doubt FB is a great springboard into other content domains, like blogs. Building an entire 3rd party biz around it seems problematic.
The adaptor is a good approach and this is basically what Google are trying to do with Open Social API. I wonder if the Blog Friends guys looked at this. Might be subject to the same beta-flux as everything else in this space just now.
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