Treading the Social Landscape

One of the most frustrating things for application developers building apps on the Facebook platform has to do with the surprising problems that show up regularly from the updates that Facebook pushes out on Tuesdays/Wednesday every week.

Here’s the problem: If Facebook has a bug or if there is something “broken” in the platform that affects a user’s experience of your app,  the user will blame you - not Facebook. 

One of our clients discovered one day that “mock-ajax” (a simple implementation of ajax that works in the Facebook canvas) was broken.   She asked if we could attempt to use FBJS Ajax as an alternative - considering that mock-ajax seemed to break regularly and that her business could not depend on the instability surrounding this feature.  We were able to suit her needs but it really brought to light the significance of this problem - that you can only be as good as your platform allows you to be.