Comments on: Did Facebook hijack a developer’s app for its own purposes?

By: NOOO REACH OUT

NOOO REACH OUT — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:13:34 +0000

Why oh why oh why do so many people mindlessly and instantly copy the latest dumb phrases, in this case, the totally gratuitous and totally WRONG use of the words “reach out”, which so many people (Americans) are using nowadays. No, it’s not the indiputably incorrect and very cringeworthy “reach out” you morons, it’s some variation on “contact”. You call yourselves writers, but can’t use the language correctly, as with the thankfully less-used nowadays “experience”, also used gratuitously and wrongly for just about everything for too long, and then the variations on “love” for things and activities which definitely don’t need any association with that word. And etc. OK, I’ll stop now, I need to vomit.

By: BoD

BoD — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:55:32 +0000

“Probably illegal”?
Don’t be a fool, the domain belongs to Facebook, they can do whatever they want with it.
Deal with it!

By: Amit

Amit — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:57:36 +0000

Vanity URL? why – they have been using it for long time – isn’t that the case?

By: Nimit Kumar

Nimit Kumar — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:37:28 +0000

It seems the HN article is still under moderation. Here is my response:

We do not doubt the hard work put in by Facebook employees and the talent of their engineers. You have done a fabulous job in making Facebook and scaling to a massive user base. We love to use Facebook and are more than happy to acknowledge it.
The point we are discussing is about the policy implementation and its consistency. First of all it is not new for Facebook to take away someone else’s URL. See this post from early 2010 – http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/23/facebook-vanity-url-harman/ . Clearly the argument you have around “If we wanted it for our own use, we would have been up-front about that” does not hold much to the test of history.
Second, the work on Facebook-Skype integration seems to have started around November, 2010 – http://blog.greenanysite.com/index.php/2010/11/facebook-vide…. We all know software product life-cycles and how marketing pages are made/thought. Let’s not discuss how that works.
Coming to specifics on this application disabling. Here are some facts to clear the air: 1. In sending Video Calling Invitations, we were not doing anything different from the following applications: Video Chat Rounds, Tiny Chat, vChatter. 2. When we exchanged some emails with the Facebook representative, we highlighted the fact that we being singled out when there were bunch of other apps having much worse policy implementations. 3. After three months of our reporting this, these apps are still functional. This demonstrates Facebook indeed had a vested interest in disabling our application. 4. Why would Facebook recommend developers to relaunch their application at a different URL when the application is known to be spammy.
There is no point trying to defend an error, which may have happened in ignorance or in intent. Nor is my intention to prove anything. We have merely stated the facts and it is for people to decide. We have moved on from this incident and as an organization we have far more important aspirations than to worry about a Facebook application.
I am responding to this, as I believe it is only fair to put the entire perspective in place.

Best, Nimit

By: Venky Iyer

Venky Iyer — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:14:12 +0000

Here’s a response a Facebook employee made on a Hacker News thread about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756284.

By: Nimit Kumar

Nimit Kumar — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:11:16 +0000

Thanks Colleen for sharing our concern. Our objective has never been to pass a judgement, but to state the facts and let users decide for themselves.

The points mentioned in the Hacker News are interesting and we have responded here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2757724

Best, Nimit

By: P

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:04:51 +0000

Rightly said, the app was not hijacked. Also as venky mentioned in the below comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756284.) the vanity url was claimed after 3 months of not being reclaimed by the original developer. People jump to conclusion real fast when big names are involved:-)

By: Nick Daniels

Nick Daniels — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:29:50 +0000

Hence the reason you cannot rely on the pedistle of another for entrepreneurship. A.K.A. self-reliance.

By: Chris Ostrowski

Chris Ostrowski — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:09:22 +0000

This is what you get when you build your company on the platform of another…

It is a flawed business strategy and they will have essential zero legal standing here.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:15:07 +0000

I feel kind of bad for the guys whose app got dumped, but… That headline is SERIOUSLY misleading. Facebook didn’t “hijack a developer’s app” at all, they terminated the use of a URL under their domain so they could use it for their own video chat app. Maybe not so “nice” but not even remotely illegal (read the Facebook developer contracts) and besides, no one gets to 750 million users by being “nice.” Sorry, but anyone who doesn’t expect and plan for this kind of thing is just a moron.