My app is very simple, but I set the whole thing up in around 2 hours.

It is called Christmas List and enables a user to detail things they would like for Christmas which are then linked to my own shopping comparison web site.

The developers page is clear and the examples provided show how easy it is to create an app.

Within about 30 mins I knew how to 1) write info to a users profile 2) connect to one of my own databases 3) Grab facebook user information.

One thing I did not find so easy was adding an ‘invite’ page to the app, however there was a tutorial in the wiki.

The whole experience was enjoyable and I intend to produce some much more interesting/complex facebook apps in the future.

Jon

We have been fairly happy with the response from facebook other than a few times when the Mock-AJAX has been slow or non-functional.

But most recently we faced an interesting problem that we never thought of. One of our applications “Chocolate Fantasy” with 500,000+ Users and fairly significant daily activity disappeared one day.

See…

http://bugs.developers.faceboo.....cgi?id=653

After we filed the bug (which to our dismay was assigned P5 priority), the facebook engineers were to quick to respond that the application was deleted. But we still do not know how did this happen..

- Was it done from a developer account ( some account could have been hacked, and we’d want to take safeguard action ).
- Did it happen from facebook’s end.

and even more importantly how can we restore the application with all its users.

I understand that facebook engineers are busy but this case points to an important concern for the developer community

a) Safeguards against deleting applications. As of now it seems a super easy thing to delete an application.

b) Process to bring up deleted applications quickly possibly with help from application developers.

On the flip side we also saw a different application that was submitted a few days earlier that was in the directory, then out, then in, then out, then in.

I strongly suspect that this has to do with them rolling out a new parser then rolling back to and older version as they tried to fix a bug or two.

See this from the facebook developers platform status: http://www.facebook.com/develo.....php?id=111

This is just a sign of the platform going through some improvements, revisions and growing pains. We live in a constant state of beta when developing for facebook. This is just the way it is as the platform continues to improve and evolve…

Cheers!

Rodney Rumford
Publisher: FaceReviews.com

I also created an Ad but have 2 Impressions for 3 days. Not sure what their deal is with the advertising platform.

Unfortunately, I think this is going to become the new standard for web development. “Broken” is the new “stable”. Everything will be in perpetual beta. The pace of development is so fast, and the pressure to release new features is so great, that nothing that can really be fully tested before being pushed live. I don’t really blame Facebook — they’re doing their best with the new realities of the world they created.

For us developers, this new reality means countless hours wasted trying to figure out where the bugs in our code live, only to get a message from Facebook two days later that, “oops, looks like we broke mock AJAX with our last push. Sorry!”

One of the apps I developed got blocked for spamming when it only had 35 users (all employees of the company who hired me to build it). It took Facebook two weeks to get back to me, only to tell me the problem was on my end, not theirs. I went through the code, ripped out everything that could be remotely construed as spam, and unblocked the app. It was blocked again within 3 hours.

Two more weeks, multiple bug reports, and dozens of emails and forum posts later, Facebook finally admitted “there’s something wonky” with their spaminess system. Of course, at that point, my app was effectively dead. It had been blocked for weeks, and any momentum it had was gone.

The frustrating part is that it was the first app of its kind, and should have done very well. Three weeks later, some clones started popping up, and the top three of them each had upwards of 500k users. And all I could do is sit back and sigh. Not fun.

Thanks TechCrunch for shedding light on this incredibly important aspect of Facebook. You complete me TechCrunch. …You complete me.

(1) For several days last week, many Javascript and mock-AJAX calls simply did not work (AJAX calls returned “onerror”). Because app devs rely on Facebook to parse and execute FBML/FBJS, there was nothing we could do but wait for the FB engineers to fix it. Gotta love those proprietary systems!

(2) Yesterday, many API calls were horrendously slow (many app pages would simply time out). Again, nothing app devs could do about it.

For all its glory, the FB platform still has more than its fair share of problems.

As experts in Facebook Application Development, we’re used to watching journalists miss the real story.
This week, TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson, who previously wrote a totally inaccurate piece about Platform Development (you can see Lonely…

Our students have been having this same issue, but I’ve heard from a few teams that they were listed within an hour of posting a comment on the Bugzilla thread (the one you already linked to).
http://bugs.developers.faceboo.....cgi?id=589

Dan
http://www.dan.ag