Inside Facebook » The Dangers of Building on the Facebook Platform
Inside Facebook » The Dangers of Building on the Facebook Platform:
The Facebook platform is great. Great, that is, except when a bug on Facebook’s end renders your application useless. People expecting to see growth like iLike were sorely disappointed if they were unlucky enough to run into a series of timeout bugs that have struck Facebook in recent days. According to Facebook these problems are all fixed, but for some, it might be too little, too late
This is an important point to remember, and it’s a point I covered somewhat in my recent blog piece Making My Life Simpler, but it can’t be emphasized enough, either: when you choose a service to build your site/services/whatever on, you are in many ways, now held hostage to how well that service is run.
So choose carefully and well. Or build things so simple you can trivially move them around at a moment’s notice. Of course, I’ve found out that in my case, something that simple isn’t useful enough to warrant building, so I try to choose services and vendors that I can stick with for a time…
Of course, it also needs to be said this isn’t a problem specific to Facebook, or to social networking, or web-based services, or — anything specific out there. This is true whether Facebook barfs on a widget, or your ISP’s spam-blocking goes wonky and eats all your email without telling you, or your home network provider updates a router with bad routes and knocks you off the air, or someone back hoes a fiber cable in Pawtucket.
You can’t be online without using services provided by others, and once you commit to that service, you’re beholden to their quality. That’s one reason why I think so many people are critical of their (a) cable company, (b) cell phone company, or (c) ISP. Because to some degree these are relationships where you may not have a choice in vendor, may not have any ability to manage the reliability, and when it’s unreliable, you really notice it — but on the other hand, even the so-called “bad” cell phone companies (like AT&T Wireless) has 90%+ happy customers, including, I’ll admit, me; I did Verizon and T-mobile, Laurie did Sprint, and we both find AT&T best for our situation.
Which is just a nice reminder that there are no absolutes here. It’s what works best in your situation.
What services like Facebook are doing are changing the equation of how sophisticated and complex the service you’re signing up for when you commit to a vendor. It gives you a lot more “bang for the buck” than, say, grabbing a copy of vBulletin and installing it on a web server — but if it goes spung, the impact on you is a lot more, too.
It brings up an interesting question: how do you evaluate possibly committing to a vendor like Facebook? It’s one thing if, like me, it’s a facebook account. my life won’t end if that’s down for six hours. But if I were going to integrate that into a project of some sort?
Do companies like Ning and facebook need to publish data to help people understand how reliable they are? metrics on support cases and how quickly they’re resolved? uptime numbers? average response time for the servers? It’s a tough question, because even if they do, how do you know they’re accurate and unbiased? And you can’t know they won’t change.
Larger companies have IT organizations that deal with these problems (some better than others!). Part of the reality of this new environment is that it’s not making these problems go away: you are still your own IT organization, whether you are an individual, a small operation, or a SOHO. But the technological choices that need to be made are getting more complex, and the impacts of making a bad decision are more drastic.
But the results are more than worth it — you can do things with Facebook you simply can’t do by downloading a hunk of code and installing it on your server; and as these services continue to expand and mature, that’ll continue. As long as they stay up and reliable…
Related posts:
- Facebook and third party apps I said this a few days ago: Chuqui 3.0.1...
- FactoryCity » Stop building social networks FactoryCity » Stop building social networks: In his kick-off...
- VentureBlog: Splunk: A Software Enabled Platform for Data Search I’ve been meaning to talk about Splunk. Now’s probably...
- Is Zillow building a ghost town? » mathewingram.com/work Is Zillow building a ghost town? » mathewingram.com/work: Now,...
- Scoble, Facebook, and who owns data Technovia: Scoble, Facebook, and who owns data: In fact,...
and any purchases you made will be treated as referrals by us.
