Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook

Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by rhizome on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @02:43PM (#2255472)

Is the info being provided by the user, or is the app detecting info that is no longer being provided by the user, i.e. lack of friend status is not the same as a notification that you are no longer friends. If the deal is with regard to the former, I can easily imagine that FB doesn't tell you these things intentionally. If they leave it as a silent disconnect, they can construct their TOU to prohibit detecting connection state since FB does not actually provide that data. I guess in other words, FB may simply prohibit extracting any information from their service that they do not explicitly provide.

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by joe_the_user on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @02:59PM (#2255540)

I'd speculate that extracting more information here is a gray area in general but it should be clear that this would be the "blackest part" of the gray - ie, potential stalking/exploitation material.

Facebook lets people post where they are when. An app that determines when someone isn't home or when someone is alone in a dangerous area would still be undesirable.

Note also - Friend doesn't let someone explicit reject a friend request and it doesn't let people "unlike". This may seem dictatorial but in many ways it's "good moderation/curation of the space". It's just as logical for Facebook to remove apps that want to add "the forgotten" "reject button"/"unlike button".

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by rhizome on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @03:41PM (#2255715)

I doubt it's a gray area in the FB offices. The strategy is about more info in than info out, so the flow directions are certainly controlled resources. The rules don't even allow you to use someone's FB profile picture unless they're currently logged in. This is an important point.

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by smackfu on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @05:44PM (#2256147)

Facebook also lets you delete updates from your wall, so that it's not obvious something changed. This circumvents that.

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by rhizome on Thursday February 24, 2011 @12:51PM (#2258969)

I tend to think of these kinds of apps as "slow spiders," which when thought about in that way makes a bit more sense on the FB-ban side.

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by fossuser on Thursday February 24, 2011 @12:05AM (#2256983)

It's provided by the user, when they switch their relationship status from in a relationship to 'single' it appears on everyone's feed.

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by rhizome on Thursday February 24, 2011 @12:42PM (#2258926)

Does anything post if you remove your relationship status rather than change it to something else?

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Re:Breakup Notifier Shut Down By Facebook by fossuser on Friday February 25, 2011 @07:44AM (#2261961)

It does not, but from what I understand the 'break up notifier' only alerts you when somebody switches the status to single. Not when they hide it.

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