Daily Archives: April 4, 2008

internet, software development, web authoring

Reality strikes for Blog Friends Facebook app

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Just spotted this sad note from the developers of one of the few Facebook apps I’ve enjoyed using, Blog Friends. The app combines blog aggregation with social networking, and does a good job of highlighting interesting posts you might otherwise miss:

Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow …. the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.

What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.

We’re shutting down, as of today.

It’s tough to prosper without a sane business model; and it’s tough to survive on some third-party’s proprietary platform.

Proprietary platforms love developers (Ballmer’s battle cry, remember), because they add value. They are risky for developers though, because the platform owner can change the rules.

Is Bubble 2.0 going to end the same way as Bubble 1.0?

microsoft, software development

Microsoft discusses next-gen MSDN … on Facebook

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According to this blog post, Microsoft is setting up a buzz group on Facebook to discuss the next generation of its online documentation for developers, the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) Library:

We have put a facebook group together to aggregate together the folks who want to work with us to provide feedback, usability and ideas for the next generation of the MSDN Library. We call this project Library 3.0 and we will be organizing events and presentations from this group to bring us together on the project. My goal is build quorum of members over the next months with kickoff’s in late May for the first events.

It’s an interesting place to hold the discussion. Yes, Microsoft has a small stake in Facebook; but it also runs a vast network of technical communities and is doing great business with its Sharepoint collaboration platform. So why use Facebook?

Of course, two key areas that need improving in MSDN are collaboration and search, so you could argue that choosing a third-party platform for collaborating on MSDN itself is significant.

Then again, it’s probably more to do with internal red tape. What’s easier: getting corporate agreement on some new developer relations initiative and setting up the infrastructure, or just sticking a new group on Facebook?

If you are interested, the group is here. Currently it has no content or discussion whatsoever. Not a good start; but there’s time…

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