Like many other developers, I have hated the way Facebook handles applications for a long time: the APIs are buggy as hell, poorly documented, change constantly, crippled beyond belief, completely proprietary, a vast pain to test and debug, and increasingly obviously geared towards moving everything off the open Web and into Facebook itself. But with several thousand OpenFlights users happily using the app, we put up with the pain.
But now the camel’s back is broken. Only a few short weeks ago, Facebook announced that profile boxes were doomed and that all applications had to migrate to profile tabs. We duly did so, only to get smacked in the face with another wet trout: as of today, profile tabs are also gone. Their replacement? Nothing: all applications have to live on their own pages within Facebook, and users aren’t allowed to attach them to their profiles in any way, shape or form. Too bad if you want to share your flight map with your friends, because as of now, you can’t.
So we’re going to do the only thing we can: say a nice, big hearty “fuck you” to Facebook and start looking for alternatives. Any suggestions?
(And just to be clear: the part of the OpenFlights Facebook app that feeds your flights to your Wall is not affected and not going away for the moment. However, it’s a matter of time until Facebook breaks it again, and at that point we’ll probably nuke the app for good.)
Blackfaced,
-jani
November 7, 2010 at 11:39 am
facebook is shooting itself in the foot! things would be downhill for them from here.
mark this day
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November 7, 2010 at 12:58 pm
It’s impossible to say good bye to facebook, like impossible to say good bye to Internet. They are first in the race where if you are second you are nobody. But you are right, removing of app tabs is more then treachery, is stupidness. They want merge dinamic information (their wall with apps walls), but ignore static information (don’t want merge profiles). They just don’t understand that users need both and why they become first, why they bit tweeter, mysapce etc.
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January 18, 2011 at 12:08 pm
i know this is months old, but for some reason (what’s left of) the openflights facebook app started incessantly posting my latest flight updates to the world. dozens of updates, never ending. i was forced to remove the app. anyway “the OpenFlights Facebook app that feeds your flights to your Wall is not affected” seems to have problems and should be looked at or deactivated.
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February 3, 2011 at 3:16 am
@slappy: Updates were disabled a while back because of this problem, but the issue should be fixed now and updates are turned on again. See http://openflights.org/blog/2011/02/03/facebook-updates-back-online-for-now/ for the full scoop.
-j.
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October 17, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Is there still a chance to have my flights post on the day of departure? Haven’t seen this feature for several (6+) months…
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December 12, 2011 at 3:33 am
As suspected, the Facebook app proved unmaintainable and has now been completely deleted.
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April 3, 2013 at 8:39 am
Have you considered an app for Google+?
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