Feathers: An apology and explanation for last weeks’ Facebook® outage.
Feathers™ Visage (formerly Feathers for Facebook® was crippled by Facebook last week due to a trademark dispute. This has now been resolved.
Articles
15 May 2010
Last week, Feathers experienced an unexpected loss of service from Facebook® which meant that Feathers Visage (previously Feathers for Facebook®) could not post updates to Facebook®. This has now been fixed and you can once again post to your Facebook® profiles using Feathers. I would like to explain to you what happened and why.
On May 5th, without notice, and when I was busy preparing for a conference I presented at in Belgium this past Monday, Facebook® restricted Feathers's access rights, stopping it from posting status updates and thereby crippling the application. Unfortunately, this coincided with Feathers being featured on the German and Austrian app stores last week. This meant that a large group of people bought Feathers only to find that they could not update their Facebook® status with it.
I realized the extent of the issue only after returning from Belgium and immediately got in touch with Facebook® to find out why they had restricted the application and what I needed to do to get them to unlock our access. They replied to me on the evening of May 13th that it was because they considered the title of the app a trademark infringement (because it contained "for Facebook®") and because the icon contained the Facebook® "f".
You probably couldn’t pick a worse time for a zombie infestation than Halloween.
If it had been any other time, the very first of the pale-faced, putrid undead would have stuck out like sore thumbs in polite society and been hastily disposed of by the city’s overfunded and underutilized (and thus rather bored) police force. End of story, as they say. As it was, however, the first victims of the highly-infectious RNA virus that transmogrified otherwise mild-mannered accountants and supermarket checkout clerks into flesh-hungry zombies blended in perfectly with the less ravenous participants in the Fifth Annual Zombie Pub Crawl, providing entertainment for the onlooking crowd as they attacked each other and caused all manner of mischief. Some in the audience even remarked at how real the screams of the other zombies sounded before adding their own to the rising cacophony as the infection spread from flesh to flesh. And that is how it came to be that the zombie horde swelled its ranks as it made its way through the previously-uncannibalistic (and sometimes even sunny) sea-side town of Brighton.
It was October 31st, 2009 and the zombie virus had picked the gay capital of the United Kingdom to make its debut. Not that it mattered. The virus didn’t discriminate.
You may have been wondering why I disappeared off the face of the earth for the past month after announcing that Evolutio – which I thought was going to be my first iPhone app – was going into Alpha.
Demoing iPhone apps during presentations is a bitch because Apple hasn't (yet) given us a way to mirror the screen like Steve Jobs does during his keynotes. The alternatives all suck to various degrees: use a camcorder, an Elmo (the projector, not the Muppet), or the iPhone Simulator. The iPhone Simulator is the easiest option and is fine unless you're trying to demo features only found on the device (like GPS, etc.) or make a demo video of your app being used in the field.
Of course you love your users so you want to give them Tender support. Even better, you want to give them Tender support using your own domain.
If you're with GoDaddy, just follow the instructions on Tender. If, however, you're running your own WHM (Web Host Manager)/CPanel setup and managing DNS yourself, read on.