Facebook screws app developers on notifications

If your business model is reliant on annoying the users of a proprietary 3rd party platform, you shouldn't be surprised when the rug gets yanked out from underneath you.

As a facebook user, I'm happy I'm not longer gonna get "your friend has invited you to this app..." notifications. As a developer, though, I can see why this would be frustrating.

I replied on the site, but I'll share my comment here as well.<p>I work on Facebook Platform. We never "turned off the Requests functionality for apps that are not labelled as games, breaking many live apps." We never turned off requests. We never broke a single app.<p>What we did do was test the impact of issuing a notification for a new app request for several categories of apps. The sending and delivering of requests still worked through this test and nothing broke. Users could still send requests and they could receive them on Facebook.<p>The key thing to bear in mind is that our APIs often express "intent", not specific UX actions on Facebook.com or our mobile apps. We are always testing new user experiences to see what the best experience is for a given intent from an app. Such was the case with this test.<p>Again, no apps were broken, we were simply testing if/when/how we should surface notifications for app requests to users.<p>We have concluded this particular set of tests and if we are going to make some permanent changes, we will make sure to inform our developer community.

This story is about 3 years late. Facebook long, long ago made notifications unreliable. They just took them from near-worthless to totally worthless for some apps.<p>Nobody who has any clue what they're doing is relying on those notifications getting through en masse now, at least not without a contract with Facebook.

I don't know if this has changed recently, but when the FB Platform launched, Facebook was notorious for constantly breaking publicly documented APIs. In fact, an unmaintained wiki was their official documentation.<p>I'm surprised anybody is still surprised when Facebook changes its rules without warning.

"So this is a warning - develop for the Facebook platform and run the risk of your business losing its whole value over-night."<p>This goes for using any platform. Look at the apps developed using the Twitter platform. This is one reason I've been trying to work on other ideas for a business, or to do my own crawling, for unscatter.com. Using API's from another company is always going to be a product risk.

Whats annoying about all these new fandangeled web platforms is that they really screw third party developers over with drastic API changes which only benefit their own interests.<p>This is totally different to how things used to be done back in the desktop software era.... oh wait... oops.<p>P.s it sucks to be small and at the mercy of big boys

This is why all social integrations should be as light touch as possible: keep the value somewhere you control it.

The documentation has always explicitly stated that notifications may or may not be triggered by requests: <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/channels/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/docs/channels/</a>

Facebook is protecting its users from spammers aka app developers.

I'm surprised that people still have expectations of Facebook, given what twitter has done in the past ...