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Turns on a dime. Whether you want it to or not.

Turns on a dime. Whether you want it to or not. published on 4 Comments on Turns on a dime. Whether you want it to or not.

Also, it would yell loudly about who you were, where you were going and who you were going to meet there. There’d be a switch to turn that off. It would be located behind the catalytic converter on the underside of the car, and would be functional only when the car was moving at freeway speeds.

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An interesting conversation unfolded after this first appeared on ReadWriteWeb. Here’s what I wrote there:

For those of us who develop apps or manage engagement strategy, is there any platform more infuriating, any terrain less stable, any regime more prone to arbitrary and capricious rule changes than Facebook?

Goodbye “fans”; hello “like”. Goodbye boxes; hello profile tabs. Goodbye contests-with-dairy-products-as-a-prize; hello you-can’t-have-contests-with-dairy-products-as-a-prize.

I’ll say this much: My work in Facebook has allowed me to better embrace the impermanence of all things.

A commenter suggested this is a radical field, change is to be expected, and (to paraphrase) roll with it, dude. I replied (grumpily) that “constant incremental Agile-style change, I can cope with. More significant change based on some kind of rationale or, better yet, roadmap, I can embrace. But for years, Facebook has been notorious for dropping bombshells from out of the blue, and making unannounced or poorly document under-the-hood changes that break apps and make developers’ lives hell.”

Can you tell I carry a grudge from the promotion guidelines fiasco?

Anyway, what do you think? Do I need to lighten up and embrace Facebook’s turbulence, even when clients’ budgets are on the line? Or is that just giving in to (quote from that same reply) to “disregard for customer, user and developer communities”?

4 Comments

Facebook pretty much sucks from a user-interface/experience perspective. Nothing much is ever where it used to be or ought to be and the whole thing is horrid. Personally I find the whole thing horrid, even though it's the de facto standard way to do the social networky thing. In the English-speaking world at least.

For now, they own the eyeballs (eww) so they get to dictate. Their disregard for their users and third-party developers does at least open the door for a possible replacement that could consign Facebook to wherever AltaVista now lives.

Well, maybe.

Grumpy +1

Clients are going batshit trying to keep up with all the changes and are not happy about having to pay to have someone explain whether/how these constant changes affect them.

I guess I should be happy for the revenue stream, but I could be doing so much more productive things for them than constantly following up on FB’s latest whim (which is about what they seem to be)

And no, I’m not a developer, so I can’t even imaging what kind of misery lies behind that door.

Paul

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