tantek.com

Facebook Auto-Posts Application "installed" Activities But Not "deletes" Or: A 420 Limit Makes Me Blog

on (ttk.me b/4AM1) using BBEdit

Apparently Facebook is more than happy to auto-post an update of sorts to your profile when you install a client Facebook application, e.g.

Tantek installed the BlackBerry application on his phone.

However no such notification occurs when you delete the application.

I'm sure there's a technical reason for no auto-update saying I deleted the Facebook app from my BlackBerry - likely there's nothing in the BlackBerry API for an application to gather/send feedback upon deletion (e.g. some sort of "Sorry to see you go, please use this box to give us feedback on why you are deleting this application.")

Imagine if every "platform" that has an interface for the user to explicitly "install" "apps" and "delete" them had a mechanism for gathering user feedback/rants on such apps and passed it along.

My impression is that Apple's iTunes App Store has some sort of provision for this where you can review an app when you remove or delete it. Anyone have details on this or know of other platforms that collect feedback upon user deletion of applications?

Ironically, I was attempting to post this mini-critique as a "Status" update to Facebook, and was met with:

Facebook Alert: Status Update Too Long

Perhaps it was the cognitive load of having to choose whether to shorten it to less than 420 characters, or use a Facebook "Note" (not really understanding how/why that is different from a "Status") or perhaps it was the presence of a self-centered artificial dichotomy (Facebook Status or Note) that I instead said screw it, "Cancel", and decided to just post in my blog (where I understand the difference between a "note" and an "article" per ActivityStreams) instead of their (somewhat walled) garden silo. Or perhaps that was exactly the intended effect on an indieweb person like myself, who read that alert as such:

"Status updates must be less than 420 characters. You have entered 1,035 characters here. Blog posts can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post your update to your blog instead?"