May 13, 2015

Goodbye Facebook

Facebook v2.0 has made our integration useless.

As expected, Facebook has migrated our application to v2.0 on May 4. Since then we’ve been limping along returning mostly empty Facebook address books. We’ve had a chance to feel out the new API and it’s clear that there’s no more value in keeping Facebook as a source.

Action Required:

As a CloudSponge customer, you should remove Facebook from your integration. Please take remove any Facebook deep links from your widget integration. If you are using our REST API, please stop making requests for Facebook.

Is it really that dramatic?

The chart to the right shows how our total number of contacts imported has dropped to near zero for Facebook. The chart doesn’t show it, but we are still seeing very few imports coming through for a handful of our customers. I’ll be reaching out to these accounts in the next few weeks to see what value, if any, they continue to get from our Facebook integration.

Now What?

Starting immediately, we will be removing Facebook as a source from our list. We will continue to honor Facebook import requests from deep links and on our REST API for now. Eventually, we will stop serving Facebook requests and will instead redirect to the widget list of sources or refuse to serve this source.

We will continue to watch for new versions of the Facebook API that might reverse these recent restrictions, but nobody is holding their breath.

We’re not alone in feeling abandoned. Other services have had to adapt to the changes by removing or limiting their integration with Facebook. Some developers have even started a campaign on change.org. It’s a crappy situation and there are a lot of disappointed people.

Reach out to support@cloudsponge.com if you have any questions or just want to vent.

Graeme Rouse, CTO at CloudSponge

Follow @thunderouse

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