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)."
But... but... (Score:5, Informative)
... we hate facebook apps!
Re:But... but... (Score:4, Informative)
Well then,
There, I took out all the unimportant parts of the article so you can block the App Center more easily. :D
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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.
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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)
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.
This is why (Score:2)
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Interesting. It worked for me.
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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)
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!
Re:This is brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook aren't launching an App Center to sell iOS applications, they are launching an App Center to sell Facebook applications. Facebook applications are basically web applications that are presented through Facebook's interface. The only hurdles Facebook face with iOS are a) making sure their app developers present interfaces suitable for small screens and b) making sure there's no link to buy the apps from within their native application (or else give Apple a 30% cut).
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Just to be clear, the AppCenter will include both iOS and Android apps, but not for sale. There will be links to the platform's respective native app stores. However, only those apps that use Facebook login will be included on the store.
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So really nothing more than a marketing ploy? the dead link to this service is really encouraging :) I mean even just a place-holder would of been nice.
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It looks like the apps will be available for the mobile devices to which they currently are not.
OMG he is going to be a millionaire! (Score:2)
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If that is your idea of a joke, I wish the joke was on me!
This can only end in tears (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
banned from appstore (Score:2)
Re:They announce this now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems odd but im guessing they had a reason for it.
apps (and app stores) are all the rage now... This is to lure unsuspecting investors who don't know this is a gimmick.
Re:They announce this now? (Score:4, Insightful)
There isnt going to be a shortage of investors.
Despite a lot of the rhetoric/slashdot hate, facebook is a successful company that makes money in a now proven way of internet advertising.
There may be a dotcom bubble brewing with a lot of companies that will implode, facebook isnt one of them.
The main reason for the IPO is to reward the people that own the company now and comply with laws, it isnt for the cash that will be raised.
Re:They announce this now? (Score:5, Insightful)
There may be a dotcom bubble brewing with a lot of companies that will implode, facebook isnt one of them.
I wouldn't be so sure. Social networking is based almost entirely on Metcalf's law. The reason Facebook has value is that people use Facebook. But social networks are trend-based. And people hate Facebook. They only use it because their friends use it and vice versa; again, Metcalf's law. All it takes for Facebook to dry up and blow away is for something that doesn't initially look like a social network, which Facebook can't quickly replicate, to garner a critical mass of users and then let people realize that the thing they and their friends now all have can also be used as a Facebook replacement, and suddenly Facebook is Myspace.
The main reason for the IPO is to reward the people that own the company now and comply with laws, it isnt for the cash that will be raised.
Which is a huge red flag. If a company is issuing stock, not because it actually needs more investors or capital, but instead to create a bigger market for the existing owners to sell their shares and cash out, that is telling you something about the faith of the existing owners in the future value of the company.
Really the problem is this: We are very close to, if not already past, Peak Facebook. Pretty much everyone who wants to be on Facebook already is, so where is the opportunity for growth?
That's why it isn't a normal IPO. The company isn't taking investment capital in order to grow the company; the company is already big. You would be investing in AT&T, not Google-in-2004. Except that you aren't investing in AT&T, because AT&T has tangible physical assets behind it. All Facebook has is tons and tons of users -- but it doesn't own the users. They don't belong to it, and they can migrate away from Facebook as fast as they arrived. In other words, it's a company you would be paying a lot to invest in, which doesn't have an obvious path to additional growth, and which is in a high-risk market with a substantial possibility that it will lose its user base in the medium to long term and thereby become effectively worthless.
That's not something I would pay a lot of money to invest in.
Re:They announce this now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be so sure. Social networking is based almost entirely on Metcalf's law. The reason Facebook has value is that people use Facebook. But social networks are trend-based. And people hate Facebook. They only use it because their friends use it and vice versa; again, Metcalf's law.
You know the only difference between Facebook on the web today and Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s is that businesses (and sometimes the government) required Windows/Office and familiarity with it. Given adequate ubiquity, there's a large possibility [1] that this [2] could occur [3]... once it becomes de-facto standard, good luck getting rid of it.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/240646/spotify_adds_facebook_requirement_angering_users.html [pcworld.com]
[2] http://www.slashgear.com/facebook-access-becoming-mandatory-part-of-job-college-applications-06217136/ [slashgear.com]
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20027837-501465.html [cbsnews.com]
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You know the only difference between Facebook on the web today and Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s is that businesses (and sometimes the government) required Windows/Office and familiarity with it.
Only if by "the only difference" you mean "only one of the numerous, important differences."
Facebook is not an operating system. They don't get to decide the set of APIs web developers are allowed to use and EEE all the standards so that apps developed for Facebook can't be ported to anything else. The typical "Facebook" app is 95+% bog standard HTML and JavaScript (if not Flash), and the rest is generally just a user authentication hook which can trivially be swapped out for The Next Big Thing when the tim
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Facebook is not an operating system.
By being a defacto-required identity provider, they are a very important platform - look at Dropbox or Skype for examples on how important and ubiquitous these tools are.
Operating systems, internet file systems, chat/presence, search engines... they are all platforms. Sure you can compete with Facebook quite successfully, but if you don't intend to, why do it? If your business/startup can benefit (or even profit) from Facebook ID (and social graph), and by outsourcing what's not critical, you can get a le
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Operating systems, internet file systems, chat/presence, search engines... they are all platforms.
But they aren't the same kind of platform. An operating system provides a wide diversity of things to developers: Filesystem access, threads and locking primitives, networking support, a GUI framework, etc. Things that get ingrained deep down in the fine details of a piece of software. And Windows does all of those things using very different APIs than any other operating system.
Facebook doesn't have that level of breadth. User authentication is a single thing that can easily be cordoned off and made modula
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Buying listed shares isn't about fast growth for the majority of investors (which are institutional investors such as pensions and insurance).
Investing into listed shares is about the portfolio, not individual shareholdings. The objective for the portfolio is the specified combination of risk & return. People tend to say it's about maximising return for a given level of risk, but that's not really true because what they tend to actually be looking for is, say, coming out 10 years later with something ap
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Buying listed shares isn't about fast growth for the majority of investors (which are institutional investors such as pensions and insurance).
Investing into listed shares is about the portfolio, not individual shareholdings. The objective for the portfolio is the specified combination of risk & return. People tend to say it's about maximising return for a given level of risk, but that's not really true because what they tend to actually be looking for is, say, coming out 10 years later with something approximating an 8% annual return - which is a lot more like minimising risk for a given level of return.
I understand that. What I'm saying is that Facebook is in a precarious position right now. They don't have a lot of growth potential, but they have a lot of risk e.g. if Google+ takes off, or Apple starts a social network, or some startup comes along and eats their lunch. They're in a market where fortunes change overnight. And with that level of risk, you would expect to at least have a high level of growth...but they're already big. So you end up with a stock which is high risk without high growth.
Of cour
Is there an app for blocking app requests? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is there an app for blocking app requests? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Go figure, there's not a whitelist option.
That sounds like a good idea for a FB app!
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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.
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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.
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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
One app to rule them all (Score:4, Insightful)
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
There's a Fapp for that... (Score:1)
That is all.
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It's a good thing that they are all on one sight so they can be ignored as a group.
Facebook is the new AOL.
I suggest they merge with Microsoft, like AOL did with Time-Warner (MS isn't that stupid though). That's the kind of wealth redistribution I can support. The best was 'The Money Store', that was one, old money, New England family losing it's ass on MBA thinking.
Native apps are walled gardens. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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...you are on crack....
Writing like that, and on crack? Chapeau!
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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).
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Thankfully, you couldn't be more wrong.
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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
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So why are apps so popular? (Score:1)
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?
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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.
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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.
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Actually, the downward spiral of Facebook started on February 4th 2004 [wikipedia.org].
Facebook's plan (Score:1)
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!
It's come full circle (Score:2)
So now facebook is AOL? I guess for many people, if it isn't on facebook, it just doesn't exist.