Raymond Law

Any frequent Facebook user probably experienced many down time from Facebook. Sometimes the apps are not accessible, sometimes the FBML is fucked up, sometimes facebook.com itself is down. This is getting ridiculous. How can they be down so frequently after hiring away so many Googlers…

Just want to rant about developing on the Facebook platform. It is a pain in the ass!

I first read from Marc Andreessen’s post Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web about this. It’s also been techcrunched.

Google is launching OpenSocial API this week. If you are familiar with Facebook’s API platform, you will easily understand the importance of OpenSocial and how it works. Unlike Facebook’s proprietary API using FBML, FQL, ..., OpenSocial uses standard Javascript and HTML so that you can do what Facebook already does on any existing social networks.

As an app developer, you can build your application and have it run in any participating social networks (Will Facebook join one day?).

As an owner of a social network, you can participate in OpenSocial to allow your network’s app developers to build applications to live within your network, and your users to add these applications to their profiles. You can create your own social networks with Ning.

This is indeed great news for everyone as the web has become more and more customizable and flexible, and user experience will be enhanced by innovative app developers.

We will definitely think about doing this at OnMyList.

We have spent the last 2 days to fix, improve, clean up the OnMyList facebook app. There is this new way of using FBML to do invitations. I figure it will help some other folks out as well. If you are looking to spread some viral on facebook, take a look at Facebook app invites with RoR.

BTW, we are using RubyonRails and Rfacebook.