I am not a big fan of a lot of apps that do rounds of Facebook and Twitter actually, but I feel it is the whole concept of third party apps that have made FB and Twitter as big as they have become. And I guess this is something a lot of others who follow social media might agree with. So when two apps that users might have really loved gets the call to shut operations as a social media enthusiast you certainly don’t feel very good about.
Once Facebook announced their activity streams open to be taken out of Facebook, we saw a new app – Newsfeed RSS come up that allowed you to export Facebook’s newsfeed as an RSS. It basically allowed you to pull your Facebook newsfeed out of the site and publish as an RSS feed elsewhere. However, citing privacy issues Facebook has now pulled the plug on the app and is no longer available for use. While as a user one could have allowed the feeds to be pulled, the privacy issue cropped up because the app exported the feeds of even the friends of users. This in all probability without the permission of those users.
The app itself had many advantages and was mighty useful in Facebook’s apparent goal of ubiquity and hence its pull down is bad news. The developer dude who made the app however agrees that Facebook is right in having pulled the app down and is currently working on a solution to the problem of privacy.
On the other hand Twitter closed down StatTweets – a painstakingly made app for sports lovers on Twitter. StatTweets was a service designed to keep followers apprised of sports and team-related stats through a series of roughly 650 Twitter accounts. It basically allowed people to follow updates using the tag #Statme. Twitter closed the account for mass account creation (the 650 accounts) and squatting (the team names).
The problem on this end is that they had ammassed as much as 63,000 followers through these accounts, so users found this useful. It is pretty evident therefore that whether the app was infringing any terms or not, the community had accepted it. The whole point of these terms anyway is to let the community be clean and enhoyable rather than a hassle. So in that Twitter should have at least seen if the app is spammy in its nature, which evidently it isn’t before being a harsh big daddy.
The reason FB and Twitter took these steps is clear, and that in fact presents a scary picture. As these sites continue to go mainstream and increase the size of its user community, they are likely to be stricter in how others use their system. And that in the process can kill some really good innovation or useful tool for the community and thus hurting the community in the process.
