Problems With Facebook

Lately I’ve been noticing a ton of problems over in Facebook land. First of all, alot of the searches seem to return inconsistent results. Sometimes certain friends will appear, and another times they don’t. It seems to be entirely random, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass once you cross over a 100 friends or more. Local gastown-walking-guru Rod Bruno has also had his account randomly deleted several times now, with no apparent explanation.

Also, from time to time when I try to login I get the “your user account is down for maintenance” message, and then told to try again later. Maybe this is happening to the users above when they temporarily do not show up in searches. I’m surprised they don’t seem to schedule these things late at night so as not to disrupt usage.

In terms of the developer APIs, Facebook is changing many of them at a rapid pace, often ruining backward compatibility in the process. As someone who has done a few facebook apps, it’s a bit discouraging the amount of time you have to spend keeping up to date with changes going on there, and random bugs that never seem to get fixed. One that’s a major pain in the ass involves images on the profile page. Facebook caches these for improved access, but it appears that if that caching operating fails in the background, then you’re stuck with an imageless profile box for some unknown amount of time.

Another problem I routinely encounter is a complete timeout while attempting to access Facebook. Seems to be related to which server you get back on the DNS entry. The end result is that you’re stuck staring at a blank page.

I realize these guys are growing fast and that they are bound to have growing pains, but I’ve hit enough of these problems to be fairly annoyed with it.