During past month, I was busying develop a little Facebook application called Facade. It allows user to add some emoticons to a status update and comment. I was amazed when I tried to post to my friend’s comment using “Emoji” keyboard on iPhone. Technically, these are not the actual emoticons but some special characters which you cannot see using PC. When my friend read the comment through his PC, he told me he saw a comment with full of nice emoticons. Seems like Facebook changes these special characters into the actual emoticons when displaying the status and comment. After that, I did some research and found out the way to update my status using emoticons. The direction is pretty complicated and it’s impossible for casual users to type the emoticon using their PC.
In order to do so, I created an application to allow Facebook user to share his status with emoticons. The usage of this application is simple. User types the status in the textbox. If the status contains a special character code, the code will be replaced with the unicode which represents its graphic counterpart in Facebook. For example, the code “:fede8:” will be substituted by U+FEDE8 which will be transformed into magnify glass when display on Facebook. You can see its screenshot here. Less than a month after I sent it to my friend who was the first user, it had about 1.9 million monthly active users with 300K-400K canvas views daily.
Until one day, I was shocked when I found an email from Facebook Platform Policy with “Notice of Disabled” in the subject. They said my application violated the following policy.
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You must not circumvent our intended limitations on core Facebook features. For example:
a. You must not inform a user that someone has removed the user as a friend.
b. You must not track visits to a user’s profile, or estimate the number of such visits, whether aggregated anonymously or identified individually. (Section II.5 of the Developer Principles and Policies)
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You must not pre-fill any of the fields associated with the following products, unless the user generated the content earlier in the workflow: Stream stories (user_message parameter for Facebook.streamPublish and FB.Connect.streamPublish, and message parameter for stream.publish), Photos (caption), Videos (description), Notes (title and content), Links (comment). (Section V.7 of the Developer Principles and Policies)
Once the application is disabled. It cannot be enabled again.
For me, the second reason is acceptable. The way the application works can be decided that I substitute the user input’s with prepared text. I understand well why they have this kind of policy.
Although Facebook Platform Policy team clearly explained why this app and I accepted their decision about disabling this app. They didn’t state why I violated the first reason. Is the emoji feature exclusive feature for Facebook owned application? Do Facebook not implement this feature on the web intentionally? This reminds me the using of private APIs in Apple platform.
The part I most frustrated was Facebook also removed my right to mange the application profile page and make a post on the wall as a developer. The worst was I put my email on the application support field. Without the permission to change the application setting, I cannot change the support email. Moreover, the discussion feature is now disabled. User can post the topic but no one can read. Therefore I still get a lot of emails asking why they can’t use the application because they don’t notice that the application already had been disabled.
Nevertheless, I decided to not open Facade again. This was a good lesson for me. Reading the policy and play on the rules. If you feel the rule is not fair, you have 2 choices; become the rule maker or quit.
Anyway, I decided to open the Facade source code and how it works in the near future.