This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margins until your business is no longer viable, or simply make your business impossible because of indifference to your requirements.
That the service may be unreliable and it's one more point of failure is just one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to depend on FB (or Twitter, or G+ login) for your logins, and this is why their attempt to subsume the web with corporate corrals will ultimately fail.
I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook.
If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management, but you allow third-party authentication that ties into that account, especially allowing multiple OAuth providers to be linked to a single of your internal accounts (eg. see how Stack Overflow works), you can significantly mitigate the downside.
The purist and old-school web head and open standards guy in me hates it, but you can't argue with the business case for it.
>there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email
There is a simple solution to this. STOP ASKING USERS TO SIGN UP! Do your REALLY need to collect the users e-mail? Do REALLY need them to have an account at all? If you do, then when they register don't ask for their e-mail address if it isn't necessary, or at least make the e-mail address an optional field. Hacker News never asked for my e-mail, because there is no need for them to have it. I probably wouldn't have made an account if it did require an e-mail address.
Sure, it's a trade-off, we probably just disagree about the level of risk involved and the benefits gained.
As you say with FB login there are ways to mitigate that risk, but to take one example - if FB charge for the service in future at 0.01c per use, many of your users will still want to login with FB because it's easier for them, and you'll be stuck with the bill. This happened with sites using google maps in 2012 when they started charging - each of these decisions has to be weighed up individually as a risk, but I think login is too important to delegate to another site and a significant addition of complexity and risk.
It's not one level of risk-reward, you need to take a look at your specific case to make the call. Formulating a blanket opinion about this outside of a specific context is not wise.
That said, your example doesn't demonstrate much risk at all. What are the incentives for FB to start charging for this? It just doesn't make any sense for them to give up that data and that control to try to squeeze existing site operators out of a buck. I mean, never say never, but the risk is much less than it was with Google Maps where you always had to be asking what Google was getting out of this expensive and difficult-to-build-your-own service.
Facebook deleted my personal account and disabled all my fb API keys for releasing an app for Instagram that they claim violates the Instagram tos. The app has nothing to do with Facebook. This was done with no warning.
It's naive to assume that a company will defend their subsidiary. I am not condoning how they treated you but your assertion of the app has nothing to do with Facebook is incredulous.
What are you talking about? Everyone has to depend on some infrastruture to provide their service. I'd imagine pretty much every hosting platform (from amazon to dreamhost) has less reliability than facebook.
Sure, but the more external components you tie in to the bigger the chance that one of them will be down. So you try to keep such dependencies to an absolute minimum otherwise you end up with the joint downtime of all those services.
External dependencies increase failure points, no argue there.
It depends on your line of business, but if you compare the benefits of making user signup faster, lowering acquisition barriers and getting access to the social graph of users against the risks of depending on one of the top infrastructures in the cloud, I think it may well be worth the trouble.
You're both right, if you talk about different sorts of risk. There's far more chance that you'll get authentication wrong than Facebook -- and that's a risk. It's probably more likely that your authentication service will go down than Facebook's. But if it's all yours then Facebook has no control over you, so that's one less risk.
As for which risk is the most important risk, well, that's up to your business to decide. But nothing is without risk, all you can do is choose which to expose yourself to.
(S)he's talking about if you rely on an API/Third Party service over hosting.
You can packup your application and move it to Amazon/Rackspace/DigitalOcean, but if you use Facebook login exclusively or use a third party API for a core service and they decide to change (as GP suggests), you're fucked.
Using it for logins is really questionable. But if you are, for example, building a game for Facebook, it gives you many advantages, so occasional downtime is not really the biggest issue. Let's check the things you wrote about in gaming context:
- charging for the service later TRUE (viral is dead, you pay for the ads to get new players in)
- cut you out of a relationship with your own customer - somewhat FALSE (you can request e-mails from your customers, and have a direct contact afterwards). Even with fan pages, they are not cuting you out, but merely asking to pay to get your message to them
- require you to use their store TRUE, but every other platform does the same
- copy your idea and give it for free. FALSE - Facebook never made a game AFAIK
- squezee you margins. TRUE. I do notice that Cost Per Install for my games is getting higher the more I advertize, and that it suddenly jumped from about $0.15 per install to $0.50 per install a few days ago - about the same time when they switched to the new payment user interface.
Sure, but by giving them your users log-ins you are telling them how popular you are so they can sit back and wait until you reach a certain threshold or velocity. Why give a would-be competitor extra information?
Programming use of logical operators and regular speech is not compatible. I agree that this is a bug in the English language but this is a forum, not a computer program.
I'm having a bit of trouble finding the maintainer. Possibly OED, but they don't have much in the way of API documentation and I still haven't found the revision history for the source to submit a patch.
In this case "and" means "in addition to". "when you make a mistake" describes one set of situations, "when facebook makes a mistake" describes another set, and the "and" acts as a union operator. Nothing illogical here, though you might argue that English is ambiguous.
Even if I don't know you I fell pretty confident that is more probable that you are messing up with the login than FB. So the changes of a downtime are lower. The business value it's another topic...
But they do have a liberal deploy policy which is to deploy all the time and fix issues later. Has bitten them before, but generally considered a good policy.
You are correct as far as I know. Interestingly enough most of the troubles I used to have were with the absurd amounts of JavaScript on their site and failed XHRs--no full outages.
This is a very interesting event for the world: on a rough estimate, almost half a billion people are displaced right now. Where are all those man-minutes going to, now that facebook is down and they're not facing that iconic blue header bar on their browser?
The downtime will surely end and it'll be back up again for sure, facebook has very smart people behind it, but this event will have served as a very interesting 'accidental' social experiment. Honestly, I'm not that interested on what happened technically, but I'm interested what effect it had socially for the common man outside the techcrunch/HN/reddit/tech bubble.
On-topic: does facebook have a consolidated status page?
What? Displaced? The common man? Reality check, dude.
Nobody is on Facebook constantly. It was down for about 30 minutes, tops. The "common man" just did whatever common men do for all those minutes when they're not on Facebook. Maybe, maybe not, they'll make up the slack later.
Sure, someone was inconvenienced because they relied on being able to find some information or send a message on Facebook and couldn't, but I'll bet far, far more people are inconvenienced on a daily basis in a similar way when their smartphone runs out of battery or is stolen or otherwise lost. Or the network (mobile or fixed line) is down.
I didn't use the word "common man" in an "elitist" context, I used it for avid users, which is a lot of people. Most people inside the tech world underestimate the role of facebook for a person who, all their friends, family and loved ones are using it on a daily basis.
I do agree that a lot of people, if not, everybody will not go crazy or be inconvenienced by a 30-minute downtime, not everyone is on it 24/7. I'm just saying I'm interested on where all those man-minutes went to for avid users.
Probably ringing on their neighbours' door, playing Xbox or having lunch with their family, etc.
The don't actually delete your posts, they mark them as deleted. If the government requests your data they get to see everything, even those posts you decided to delete.
I think the above post was referring to Facebook losing their data, by their database actually failing. That would mean the hidden deleted posts are also removed. Of course, they wouldn't have a single database or copy of the data, so this is irrelevant.
As for not deleting data that you request to be deleted, that's normal practice. I know on every site I run, when someone clicks delete, it flags the content and it's hidden, but remains in the database. Deleted data is still valuable data, and it has a wide variety of uses.
“Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused,”
Haha, i thought the same. But could also be the NSA sending a message to not publish this. I mean the NSA needs other Service Providers to use the closed source backdoor infested stuff.
This could just be a coincidence but it seems that Spotify is bugging out, I am able to open the program but it wont play any music. I authenticate with Facebook so maybe that has something to do with it.
Like it or hate it the Facebook site isn't just any ordinary site.
Combined with the fact that its not just web access that is down, this affects all apps and sites that have Like, Follow, Recommend or Sign In integration.
It is up for me now, but there are still a lot of bugs. Most likely their database cluster is being partitioned. My newest feed was liked by some of my friends even though I can't see it in my timeline or newsfeeds :)
I took off my wlan cable on and off. It didn't help. Then I stopped the electricity for a moment - I believe in complete cold restarts. Still nothing :)
No one is ever going to see this post, but... no, it isn't. All sites experience downtime occasionally. Unless it is for some interesting technical reason or it is extended beyond a couple of hours, there is nothing newsworthy about it whatsoever. There is certainly nothing that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity about it.
Your'e right, and I didn't do that, the book Accidental Billionares mentioned that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to agrees to having such a conversation with Mr. Saverin
Maybe I'm jaded because I don't really "get" the whole social network phenomena, but honestly, who really cares anyway? Productivity will (briefly) go up; a few people dependant on FB SSO's wont be able to log into some other pointless services and the internet will continue to function.
I normally down vote people when they say "what does xyz have to do with HN?", but 3 submissions commenting on a procrastination portal being down is really scraping the barrel.
[edit]
I see the submissions have now been consolidated. That makes much more sense. Good work HN admins :)
If you Google for "www" the first result is Facebook.
For many people, Facebook is how they interact with the web. It's their primary portal for talking with their friends, sharing photos, sending messages, and catching up on news stories.
Calling it a "social network" is like calling Google only a search engine. It's way, way more. And this outage is completely unprecedented. Can you recall a previous time that Facebook has been down? I can't.
Imagine how many people are locked out of thousands of websites where the only way to sign in and check your order or something is by using Facebook login, which is not working.
People are excited, since this is one of the core missions and thinking in facebook - never be down, or people will go elsewhere. That's why it's a big deal, not everyday something goes that wrong, especially in something you put a lot efforts in.
Where will the people go? An engineer from Bloomberg was telling me once about their infrastructure, how fault tolerant and highly available it is, they have redundancy everywhere, including power from two different power plants. He said if they were down for few minutes they would be out of business - users of their trading platform would switch to Reuters very quickly. But where will Facebook users go if the site is down for a day? I'm genuinely curious.
It's more of an idea, that if you are not good, people will eventually find better service. Right now, they really can go elsewhere (if you not count bashing on twitter :)), but imagine that facebook downtimes become a norm - eventually there will be a better service.
I also do not use face book and think it is silly. However I think the event is a little interesting. There are thousands of apps that don't even function with out face book.
Many of us who read Hacker News are employed in the technology industry and have a particular interest in reliability and availability of computer systems. It's not interesting that people can't post their personality quizzes, but it is very interesting that Facebook had a production outage, particularly if we are able to learn something from the failure that we can apply to future scenarios we may encounter.
Personally, I use social networks to boost productivity. Facebook is a good management tool for different groups. I have used it to manage people for the last 4 years and it has been the best platform for me to reach everyone. Sad, but true.
It's more that they have one of the best records for reliability. Last time they went down was how many years ago? Most sites go down once a month for a few minutes.
Facebook was down? That's fantastic!
Hopefully people looked up from their devices and:
a) listened to birdsong
b) amazed at flowers and plants
c) initiated a conversation with someone in physical proximity
d) enjoyed what was going on instead of trying to snap a photo of it for facebook
e) all of the above
or
f) kept hitting "reload"...
