CRAZ8

As far as I can tell, Facebook is always broken. Ok, they do seem to struggle on serving users, but a lot of functionality breaks on Facebook every day. I’ve seen no press on this, I guess the vultures are all circling around Twitter.

Here’s some examples over the last 2 months:

• Today – The category selection tabs in the Application directory broke. They sent you back to the home page.
• Every week when they update their servers on a Tuesday, the script in my IE browser breaks and I need to restart the browser.
• When they were rolling out the Chat code in April, there were times where every second page load would get a ‘connection reset’ error.
• Sometimes login doesn’t work
• Too often to mention, the API calls will get a Connection Reset
• The ‘infinite session’ key applications can save and use later often fail in the future for no reason
• Getting an app into the Application Directory can take forever
• The new Import for RSS into your Feed seems to not work at all.
• On one of my apps, Facebook doesn’t always do the right thing for the Google Analytics script and comes to my server to get the urchin.js file if the current directory, causing Routing Errors all over my logs.

Now, when things break, its usually not all the servers, so some apps for some users will be broken, while others will be working just fine. Facebook does tend to fix these things quite quickly, but I’ve seen very little communication about what is broken when its broken.

It’s always exciting in Facebook Land!

Update: Less than an hour after writing this post, Facebook broke CSS stylesheets for apps.

In the Facebook Developer Application, the act of deleting an application does have a confirmation page, but it isn’t very clear on what application is being deleted – there is the name of the application, but not the picture or icon.

And the delete works even if you have thousands of users.

Ask me how I found this out, I dare you!

Many would say yes, but Tom Standage would beg to differ in his book The Victorian Internet

Mr Standage tells the story of the people who created the telegraph system starting at the end of the 18th century, and leading to Samuel Morse and the first electric system in the US.  He goes into the social aspects of suddenly being able to be in touch across the world, the doom and gloom that came from the newspaper industry, and the rise and fall of the operators of the equipment.

I found out about this book from Rick Segal’s blog The Post Money Value

I got my copy from the library, but Amazon seems to have a recent reprint available