Open Letter to Zuck Re: Graph API v1

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I have created an anonymous account for this post so that our app isn't specifically targeted. I can receive communication here.
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Mark,

You started Facebook to make the world an open and more connected place. The point of this letter is to describe what seems like a deliberate shift away from that core mission which I have been unable to address through any other channel.


*Resources Required to Integrate FB*
We've had to spend somewhere between 30-50% of our entire backend coding time on the project integrating, throttling, and troubleshooting our Facebook login and Graph API calls. It turned out to be a tremendous undertaking, but one that when we started building the app in phases 2 years ago, made a lot of sense. To date about $70k has been put into our Python repository in total. This may not sound like much to you, but to us, a small bootstrapped startup, it's extremely significant and represents months of long nights, broken code, and head-banging to get it working just right.


*Why We Did It*
The social use case we built is awesome. With social login, the app is able to do some magic to figure out the friends who are most likely to go to an event with you, and we recommend those "besties" first with our event recommendations. Turns out the algorithm we developed to rank these friends actually works really well. **This is a clear ideal use case of Facebook's platform, on-mission with connecting people with other people they care about.**

After months of putting out other fires related to our launch, we were finally able to get that sorting functional just a few weeks ago. It took about a year to get Facebook API calls working without errors. Just in time for Facebook to cut off the API we built our product around.


*The Reasons*
I understand why you might feel discontinuing friend permissions on Graph would protect Facebook’s social graph monopoly. But seriously, there isn't a societal interest in rebuilding the social graph, especially if Facebook continues to serve as an open data platform to be used by the community its serving.

Blocking off the friend permissions literally has the opposite effect from your desired goal. It pushes app developers like myself (and dozens of others I know of) away from Facebook and to phonebook authentication, weakening Facebook's standard as a unified sign in platform. This lessens the value for everyone in the ecosystem, and does more to jeapordize FB’s social graph monopoly than any app possibly ever could. **It’s winning the battle to lose the war.**


*The Reality of User Trust*
The small percentage of people who don't trust Facebook sign in will *never* gain a trust for it. I have personally signed up thousands for our app and heard their arguments for and against Facebook sign in. The vast majority of people literally do not know or care about customizable privacy sign in options. It's simple: if they're ok with giving up personal info, they sign in with Facebook, mostly not reading the permissions, if they're not, they don't. It's very similar to Apple Terms of Service, normal people just don't give a shit.

For us, around 80-85% of our most active users sign in using Facebook. The remaining 15-20% will never sign in using Facebook no matter what you tell them, they will just rate the app poorly if an alternate sign up option isn't available. Many of that group have actually deleted their Facebook account entirely.


*By blocking us from using friend permissions you’re accomplishing 4 things:*
1) Denying the 80-85% an awesome experience to use apps socially (wasn't that the point of FB as a platform?)
2) Creating a tremendous burden on resource-constrained startups who built meaningful tech around this platform
3) Creating a push on developers to use phonebook authentication, build their own social graph, and stop caring about FB
4) This trickles down to users, and weakens the value of, and Facebook's position as an ecosystem

In no reality is this regaining any sort of meaningful lost user trust of Facebook login. It is also not preserving a social monopoly, in fact, the opposite.


*Conclusion & Our Request*
If we truly do have to lose this amazing social use case for FB data, a huge amount of work by our team was for nothing. All of these resources from our one life were put into building a tool to bring people together – that would soon after be shut down by the group that encouraged it’s creation.

*With great power comes great responsibility.* I urge you to ask yourself, is this in line with the values you hold as a company, executive, and human? Is this the legacy you want to leave in this world?

You guys have everything. We are currently fundraising and out of cash which makes this even more painful. Please don't crush us.

Please grandfather us in to continued API v1 usage so we can continue to make our users happy. Be the awesome Facebook that I signed up for 10 years ago.


Respectfully,
[Anonymous]