Recent times have been interesting ones for Facebook developers. Recently, Facebook’s “ban bot” went through and shut down a bunch of Facebook apps for being too spumy. This was based on user feedback, but the problem was that they weren’t all simply spam apps, and they gave now warning beforehand.
Some of the apps were legitimate and had plenty of happy users, and if something was slightly off, many developers would have appreciated a warning so they could have made adjustments to be more in line with the kind of apps Facebook wanted rather than have their entire apps, and in some case businesses, simply turned off. Some were later reinstated though.
Since then, Facebook has done a number of things to make things more pleasant for developers. Things like: a new Developer App, Test User management, the Graph API Explorer, new App Insights and just yesterday, Groups for the developer app to improve management of roles.
The New York Observer ran a story today, including a screenshot sent in from a tipster that shows a post allegedly from Mark Zuckerberg’s Wall. The post says it comes from Dave Morin, and says “I just got into Chill and it’s awesome. Come chill and watch some videos with me. http://chill.com/.”
Zuckerberg’s response, as seen in the screen cap, was, “Did you post this message or did the app post it?”
Another user responded that the app posts it, and that there’s a checkbox that defaults to on, to which Zuckerberg responded, “They auto-post something saying their app is awesome coming from you? That’s lame.” 11 people liked that comment.
Morin later responded, “Mark, they posted it. Pretty lame that the[y] used my voice. That used to be against policy.”
I’m having a hard time locating the Chill app on Facebook right now, but you have to have a friend using it to even use it at this point, and they’re having issues connecting to Facebook from the site. It doesn’t sound like it was banned or anything. Facebook is actually having some API issues right now anyway.
ChillExperiencing some tech issues right now. Back up ASAP. Sorry for [email protected] us if you can’t get in!
2 hours ago via Twitter for Mac · powered by @socialditto
Update: Chill put up a blog post about the whole thing, in which they explain how the wall posting feature was clearly marked, and was opt in with a checkbox, but they removed the feature anyway. Brian at Chill writes:
So what are we going to do? We’ve already removed this feature. Why? We want there to be no question about our motives. We’re a small startup obsessed about building something that people really love. Video should be more social, immersive and fun.
I’ve already messaged Mark and let him know about the changes. He was actually really cool about the whole issue, which I appreciate.