Facebook Disconnect: MS apps thrown under a bus in Graph update Facebook Connect – a feature which Microsoft used to integrate Facebook data with Outlook and Windows phone 7 and 8 calendar and contacts – is no longer available. According to a recently posted support note: Facebook has made an update to its Graph API that will impact Microsoft apps and services. Facebook’s Graph API is the …
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"Facebook Connect – a feature which Microsoft used to integrate Facebook data with Outlook and Windows phone 7 and 8 calendar and contacts – is no longer available"
Excellent. I have no desire to mix my private address with Facebook. The integration was a step too far and made me uninstall the Facebook app on my Lumia 930 once I found that Facebook had helped themselves to my entire phonebook, and so I just used it via the web browser instead.
We don't need this level of integration and it serves no one else except Facebook.
I am forced to wonder what sort of cobbled together system is really at work here.
So, this is all about an API that enabled Microsoft Account details (contacts and calendar) to be shared with Facebook account details, and presumably vice versa. Now the API has changed so this facility no longer works, but this raises an interesting issue. Was the API called directly from an app on the Windows Phones, and therefore every copy of this app will have to be updated on every phone when MS can mobilise some of its' scant resources to the gargantuan task of rewriting an interface? Or, as this concerns the cloudy Microsoft Account thingy, should they not have implemented this interface within their own cloud, meaning that they could have simply changed the interface in this one place, keeping the "phone app to cloud" part of the interface the same, and therefore not required every phone user to download completely new copies of an entire app in order to sort this out?
This "intermediate interface" approach is standard practice in Web Services work that I do, as insulating client software from interfaces to other 3rd parties is essential to avoid this kind of disruption when 3rd parrty interfaces change. MS web services developer tools and implementations are very good, so why haven't they gone down this route for this kind of interfacing with other companies?
Just saying, I don't use Windows Phone, or Facebook myself so I couldn't give two hoots, but I do get the impression that the architecture for integration between the 2 companies hasn't been properly thought through.
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