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Facebook Software News

Facebook Announces App Center 81

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook today announced the App Center. Whether you're a Facebook user or a third-party developer, think of it like the Apple App Store or the Google Play store, but for Facebook. That's right: while in-app purchases have existed for a while, Facebook will now give developers the option to offer paid apps (users will pay a flat fee to use an app on facebook.com)."
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Facebook Announces App Center

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  • But... but... (Score:5, Informative)

    by DreadfulGrape ( 398188 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @07:20PM (#39949093)

    ... we hate facebook apps!

    • Re:But... but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by game kid ( 805301 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @07:22PM (#39949105) Homepage

      Well then,

      the URL will be facebook.com/appcenter

      There, I took out all the unimportant parts of the article so you can block the App Center more easily. :D

      • Heh... well, yeah. My only point was how bizarre a concept it seems to *buy* a FB app. I've never seen a single one that I'd pay a nickel for.

    • Eh, it's not that specific. If it requires a friends list, we hate it. The rationale comes later.

    • Re:But... but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @08:19PM (#39949479)

      Try disabling apps in your facebook account. You can't. There is a button in the privacy settings to turn off all apps. Here's what it says when you click it:

      There was an error while disabling applications and websites. Please try again.

      I have been trying for over half a year. Same error every time. Clearly they are lying, and just don't want me to turn that off.

      Shady lying bastards.

      • I'll never use facebook.
      • Interesting. It worked for me.

      • They do the same thing when you try deleting an Album or mass deleting photos from your profile.
      • Try disabling apps in your facebook account. You can't. There is a button in the privacy settings to turn off all apps. Here's what it says when you click it:

        There was an error while disabling applications and websites. Please try again.

        I have been trying for over half a year. Same error every time. Clearly they are lying, and just don't want me to turn that off.

        Shady lying bastards.

        I turned that off a long time ago, so it worked at some point in time. Do you have any apps/websites connected currently? Maybe they need to be removed first before turning it off completely.

        I do check the settings occasionally, just to check that apps haven't been turned on again without me knowing.

  • This is brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @07:24PM (#39949117)

    It'll just be like running apps on your very own computer, except these will be slower, and only usable at the whim of a third party, and will send every action you take to marketers and data-miners, and won't offer as much functionality.

    Brilliant!

  • That guy who wrote cow clicker is going to be a millionaire. Joke's on you pal, you made fun of facebook and wrote cow clicker. Now it is going to make you a millionaire.
    • "Joke's on you pal, you made fun of facebook and wrote cow clicker. Now it is going to make you a millionaire."

      If that is your idea of a joke, I wish the joke was on me!

  • by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @07:29PM (#39949151) Journal

    I wonder if they will work on your mobile devices.

    They'll be all like, "Yo Dawg, I put an app in your app so you can facebook while you facebook."

    Dead horse, stick, go.

    • by aiht ( 1017790 )

      I wonder if they will work on your mobile devices.

      They'll be all like, "Yo Dawg, I put an app in your app so you can facebook while you facebook."

      Dead horse, stick, go.

      What, you mean "Yo dawg, I heard you like beating dead horses with a stick, so I put a stick and a dead horse in your dead horse so you can beat a dead horse with a stick while you beat a dead horse with a stick"?
      It doesn't quite work for me; it's missing that spark, that je ne sais quoi, which makes a meme memorable.

    • If they work on your mobile devices Apple and Google will ban Facebook from their appstores.
  • by johnny cashed ( 590023 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @07:55PM (#39949325) Homepage
    Because I'm tired of manually blocking app requests. If I wanted to run apps, I wouldn't be on FB. I'd be on a general purpose computer. You know, the kind that runs applications.
    • by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @08:47PM (#39949637) Homepage Journal

      The most annoying thing is, there's this ONE app that I want. Which means I can't just disable them.

      Go figure, there's not a whitelist option. You can only block ALL apps, or specific ones.

      I've started reporting every "activity report" an app puts up from other people as spam. I'm hoping other people will do so as well.

      • Go figure, there's not a whitelist option.

        That sounds like a good idea for a FB app!

      • I have a few FB friends who play some sort of Zynga building game. I don't (think I) see their spam updates on the standard web page interface, but they clog up my Blackberry App interface like nobodies business.

    • Hmm... this is a good idea for a Greasemonkey script. Something to auto-report all automatic app requests as spam, auto-block them, auto-hide them, auto-set FB to not show app requests from that person, and then, finally, auto-hide FB's "there's something hidden here" left-over DIV so you don't even know there was something there to begin with. And it probably already exists.

    • If you don't want to run apps, and don't want app requests, you can turn off apps (it might be called "turn off platform apps"), in one of the settings available (probably privacy). That turns off apps completely - you don't get any requests (at least I haven't), although things still appear in the news feeds (shame these can't all be blocked).

      And as far as I can tell, apps your friends use can't access your information when they use them if you have apps turned off (otherwise they can see your name and

  • by enjar ( 249223 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @07:58PM (#39949345) Homepage

    And in the Facebook, block them

    I can only hope ... rather than having to block every request for space chicken or karma wars or castle food growers or whatnot

  • by Anonymous Coward

    That is all.

  • by slasho81 ( 455509 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @08:18PM (#39949475)

    It blows my mind to think just how much wasteful effort has gone into making the same applications work on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and also for Chrome apps, regular webapps, now Facebook Apps, and next time it would be WinPhone apps.

    Another freaking walled garden. Now we will have 3 major walled gardens (Apple's, Google's, and Facebook's) and soon Microsoft will join in as well. Is that what passes as "innovative" nowadays?

    Apps are not the future. They are the past.

    Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software. You just enter an address or click a link and you get to the most up to date "app". No installation, no updates, no permissions, no specific OS or hardware or platform necessary. It works everywhere by everyone and all the time with no hassles.

    The reason apps made a comeback is because you can charge for apps. An app is a defined thing and an installation is a chargeable privilege. So thank Apple and all the me-too followers for burdening us with software deployment and management just as we were about to escape those unnecessary activities.

    Apps as platform is not driven by mobile OSes, browsers, social networking sites, or other modern technology. It is driven by capitalism.

    So don't get sucked into yet another walled garden.

    Apps are not the future. They are the past.

    • Don't look, there are people charging and getting rich running web sights. Thank god for capitalism.

      As to web sights being the one only true app type, you are on crack. Java isn't the only language ether. Right tool for the job.

    • by mirix ( 1649853 )

      I just love when I have no access to my files and programs when my wireless service is shitty.

      (Never mind the speed and privacy issues).

    • "Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software."

      Thankfully, you couldn't be more wrong.

    • by xded ( 1046894 )

      Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software. You just enter an address or click a link and you get to the most up to date "app". No installation, no updates, no permissions, no specific OS or hardware or platform necessary. It works everywhere by everyone and all the time with no hassles.

      The more I think about it, the more I feel this all is just a World Wide Web Consortium fault. And it looks like nobody is giving them any blame for the lack of an "App standard". The fact that they were able to manage standardization on the Web for the past 30 years doesn't mean they will be able to do the same in the future or even now. The Web is already changing faster than any progress HTML5 is making.

      I know this is not as simple as it sounds, since all of the major players want to drive this change

    • Exactly the opposite, the porting effort is easy, the important thing is that the developer is able to control and decide what appstore/device to deploy on. For example to strike an exclusive deal with a dedicated platform. Shared app spaces are dangerous things. Oh, remember those poor Java devs whose apps are deployed by Chinese without authorization because Java is so freaking copy prone, exploitable and portable. App owner has to be able to control the fate of his app not some 3rd party for him, the les
    • I see your point. But then why are apps so popular? Why do people install a hundred different apps to access websites (e.g. wsj.com) instead of just using the browser to do the same?

      • Why do people install a hundred different apps to access websites (e.g. wsj.com) instead of just using the browser to do the same?

        People think that paying 99 cents for something makes it more valuable than if they get it for free. Plus, all those apps totally prove that the money they spend on smart phones and data plans was necessary.

    • by LS ( 57954 )

      You are right for the long term. But web tech isn't here yet. You still can't do anything media- or hardware-intensive in the browser at this point.

  • 1. Profit (take a cut from sale of paid apps)
    2. Profit (take a cut from in-app purchases)
    3. Profit (collect and sell usage data)
    4. Profit (sell stock publicly with record setting IPO)
    5. ???
    6. Profit!
  • So now facebook is AOL? I guess for many people, if it isn't on facebook, it just doesn't exist.

How many hardware guys does it take to change a light bulb? "Well the diagnostics say it's fine buddy, so it's a software problem."

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