My frustration has waned on this topic. It isn’t my style to complain a lot, but there just seemed to be a lot of rookie mistakes going on. I’m looking forward to moving forward and getting through these rough spots.

To your points:
1. Slow Down: Most of their current releases are not new features, but changes to prevent unwanted behavior or improvements to keep up with the exponential load increase on certain components (like FBML parser or restserver) caused by us.
2. Maintain development tiers: They most certainly do have multiple tiers. I have seen the links to their dev/test version. I just suspect it is hard to simulate the real time load they see, which may well be far more than the APIs you mentioned.
3. Sandbox: They seem to have the ability to enable certain functionality on a developer by developer basis to do invite only testing. A full sandbox might be difficult as you wouldn’t have access to your ‘social graph’.
4. Beef up QA: Seconded. You are spot on there. In the mean time, it is up to us to diligently report the issues we find and work with the Wiki to help guide the platform team.
5. The fact that we have to answer to our own customers now is a tough one. We have to apologize for issues out of our control. I think FB could do a better job of communicating the ‘oops’ to the broader audience, so they know it wasn’t our fault. Having said that, as per the above comments, there are many areas they need to change frequently just to keep up.

The problem is that, unlike Google, Facebook is making changes to their site in the middle of the day, updating code without making it transparent to the users, and generally not handling code updates very well.

All they need is someone to monitor their release cycles better. These are just suggestions — constructive criticism, if you will. However, if the offer still stands, I prefer well-aged, medium cheddar.

Seriously, this is the first time any website has every opened the doors to developers to develop directly on a launched platform with over 50 million users…

They are doing the best they can (and a damn good job too).

* Developers who submit their completed apps only to to be rejected for it being “unfinished”, with no further explanation.
* A user whose app had a bug during development that caused extra notifications to be sent out. His app was blocked for being too spammy.
* Many users have had their notifications (or the apps themselves blocked) for being too “spammy” or going over the invite limit. However, Facebook never gives a concrete definition of spamminess, or the exact threshold for invites.
* When a user creates an app, they cannot add another admin or give someone else the admin status. This means that the app will be stuck with that developer even if they leave the company. You can’t create a fake account to own the app, since that’s against Facebook’s TOS. So basically, I guess you’d have to have the founder of the company create the application, then give you their password to develop it!

I appreciate what Facebook is trying to do with the Platform, but I think they need to start being more open with the development community, and focus on fixing existing problems before continuing to add new features.

There’s a few other examples I can think of too (invitation limits? spamminess indiator? random brokenness all over the place?). Thanks, facebook, for deigning to allow us to develop for your platform. Oh, and sorry if we expect you to treat us like professionals (and act like it).

Good luck with your launch!

I read about your Wii purchase on the blog. We just purchased a Wii last week (for the kids) and I love it. Wii boxing is actually a great workout.