Facebook still in beta

The Facebook API may be great in many ways, but for stability there’s still a lot to be desired. There seems to be a slightly “gung ho” attitude to code deployment at Facebook which, although I feel some empathy with, isn’t particularly suited to a site with 50 million users. Take this recent developer update as an example:

Requests inadvertantly deleted
Dec 11, 2007 10:27am

It looks like all outstanding requests/invites from platform applications may have been inadvertently deleted last night. We are exploring various recovery options and will post here when we have more information.

So the last few days weren’t a great time to release an application, it seems, and that explains why growth (and ad revenues) have been down on my half a dozen or so.

LinkedIn to get a newsfeed

It looks like LinkedIn has been looking at which Facebook features it can steal. LinkedIn’s newsfeed does appear to actually be news rather than friend activities, however, and tries to work out what the user might be interested in. It’s only in beta at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see if it does work. Personally: I’m not convinced, because I read all kinds of disparate rubbish and I don’t see how any newsbot can work that out.

Alongside that it seems that the API is starting to make an appearance too, at least to some partners. How OpenSocial it will be is hard to tell at the moment.

LinkedIn newsfeeds in Beta

LinkedIn ‘s new homepage and API