Sunday, February 7, 2010

Facebook App Directory, Possible Frustrations

So I recently wrote a Facebook app for browsing photos.  You can try it here if you'd like.  It was mostly an experiment to learn about what it's like to go through the whole process of getting an app into the Facebook app directory.  Well, my app has been "approved", but I haven't made a post about it on my blog yet because it still hasn't actually shown up in the Facebook app directory.  It's been approved for oh, I dunno, two months now?

I browsed the Facebook dev forums and came across a couple threads about this problem.  This has been going on for a while.  There are posts from the Facebook admins about it being fixed, and replies saying "no, it isn't".  This has been going on for quite a while (over a year based on one of the threads).

I find it very interesting that such a popular thing has been broken for so long.  I'm lucky since I don't have any monetary interest in getting my app on the directory, but I can imagine this being a serious problem for people who make a living on Facebook apps.  Perhaps the higher profile apps get better service and haven't run into this problem.  I dunno.

At any rate, I thought I'd make a post about this to pass the time while I wait for my app to show up in the directory.  Once it's up there, I'll go over the features and make it official.