It looks a lot as if Facebook is closing up on third party developers. Seems like they’ve cherry picked the features they want to copy, and now are no longer interested in third parties anymore:

  • They removed the “publisher” feature, which allowed applications to offer custom story forms. They said it wasn’t used a lot - the reason was simple, they placed third party publishers in a tiny dropdown in the “attach” section, second class to their link sharing and even crappy ‘gift’ application. Of course: otherwise nobody would buy their birthday “gifts”.
  • They’re removing the extra info boxes you could put into your profile. This is a key feature for two of my applications, which allowed people to publish a calendar feed in their profile.
  • Places is aiming at killing FourSquare and similar on the long run.

Expect once-famous Facebook applications such as SuperPoke to disappear on the long run - their integration hooks have been pulled. The API gets more and more limited for the cash cow use case: games. And of course marketing. Oh, I forgot one type of “applications”. The one that basically embeds you regular web page within a Facebook tab. Wow. That’s technology!

If it was really about the users, Facebook would seriously fight Facebook spam, worms and fraud. They still don’t have that under control (and none of them used either of the removed features!). They do even less to prevent users from clicking on such bad links such as the Free iPad scam, which has been around for at least a week now. Or the famous “dislike button” scam. They could not spell much more clearly that they do not care about their users - they just want your data to sell more directed advertising to you. Forget about privacy, too!

Now that all my three Facebook applications are pretty much dead, this comes with a good side for me: I’ve been considering to disable/suspend/kill my Facebook account for quite some time. But I wasn’t sure if that would also kill my applications for their users. Now that they’re dead anyway, there is not much keeping me anymore.