Mr Kirkland

UPDATE Mr Kirkland interivew by IDG

So after an exciting start with our tracker application reaching 8000 users within 3 days after launch facebook have deleted it without warning.

Admittedly we recieved a number of ‘Facebook TOS reports’, but they were all from users that had misunderstood what the application did and were essentially false alarms. Moreover our application had been reviewed and accepted into the facebook directoty and we even had recieved direct confirmation that our idea was okay:

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your cooperation with our policies. To answer your question,
yes, anonymously tracking ‘hits’ would be fine (as long as the user cannot
tell who specifically has been visiting their profile).

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

So you can imagine just how pleased we were with the reply after I had questioned the reason for the disappearance of Tracker:

Hi Chris,

Upon further review of your application we found that it violates our Terms
of Service. You asked me if tracking the number of hits anonymously would
be within our Terms of Service. This would be, but it should only be
possible if the other user visiting the site has also installed the
application. I apologize if my answer to your initial inquiry was unclear.
Thank you for letting us know about this other application. We’ll be
reviewing its functionality as well.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

So we were given no opportunity to alter the application, no warnings that they would do this, and my attempts at discussing the erronous User TOS reports with facebook merely recieved generic replies.

Conclusion

If you are developing a facebook app, watch out it might suddenly dissappear!

Okay so the first facebook application realeased by MrKirkland hasn’t quite hit the popularity of Pirates or Zombies, but 10,000 users and almost a million page views in 3 weeks is still not bad in our books.

For our second application we thought we’d try something more practical, a “who’s been on my profile” application. We have dubbed this application “tracker“. However this app had a slightly controversial birth, namely we had to axe the ‘who’ part of the tracking. Despite a careful review of the Terms and Privacy we couldn’t find unambiguous langauge indicating whether an application recording who has visited your profile would contravene these terms.

So we decided to release the application and wait and see what happened - we’d found the developer help email responses a little slow, so we figured facebook would come to us faster this way! Well sure enough within a few hours of submitting the app to the application directory we received a refusal. However the refusal was rather vague:

Thanks for your submission of “Tracker” to the Facebook Platform’s Product Directory. We have reviewed your application, and unfortunately cannot yet add it to the directory because it violates the Facebook developer terms of service (stores user data beyond the context user session or specified timeout). Please fix this problem and resubmit the application.

So after reviewing the terms, we concluded we were violating the condition relating storing non-permantently storable data for more than 24hours, so our solution was to make only the last 24 hours of ‘who’ available.

We submitted the app a second time and were again refused. Thankfully though we recieved an email specifically indicating our goof:

Thanks for your application submission. Unfortunately we cannot approve
your application “Tracker” at this time because it is in violation of our
Terms of Service. Your application is tracking users who have visited
another user’s profile, even if the users have not opted into the
application. This is a serious violation of our users’ privacy. Please
correct this as soon as possible.

A pity perhaps as without even being in the directory the app had attracted almost 1000 users - seems that this is a popular feature! Anyway, we still felt a profile ‘hit counter’ would be worth having, especially as it seems no one had offered this application yet.

So now the tracker application has just been accepted into the directory, and has made a good start - close to 1000 new users within 12 hours of being listed, that’s about 5 times better than the sentence game!