MattMaroon.com

A week ago we released the third Facebook application in our Starfleet Commander series, Starfleet Commander Universe 2. It’s essentially Starfleet Commander with a couple game play changes (mainly mine payouts are accelerated) and other than that it’s pretty much identical to the original. It was meant mainly to be a fresh new galaxy for users to start over. While we love the original universe, and will continue supporting it indefinitely, there are now players who have been playing for over a year, making it tough for newer players to compete.

Within a couple hours of launching we got an email saying:

Hi,

We take abuse on Platform very seriously, and our systems routinely screen for abusive applications receiving negative user feedback.

Starfleet Commander – Uni 2 has been permanently disabled, as our automated systems detected it was abusive and generating user complaints. Please read our Developer Principles and Policies at http://developers.facebook.com/policy for more information.

If your application was not abusive or generating user complaints, please visit the Help Center at http://www.facebook.com/help?page=431 for further assistance.

Thanks,

Facebook Platform Team

We were immediately freaking out. We knew the app wasn’t abusive as it was identical (as far as API usage goes) to the original, which we know has been vetted by Facebook on many occasions.

In the past Facebook has been great about letting us know if there was something that violated their platform terms. We’ve always tried to comply with every term, but there are so many of them, many subjective, and often seemingly not enforced at all, that it’s impossible for an app developer to not step over the line. But every time we’ve been contacted we’ve fixed the problem within hours, and every time Facebook has been pretty responsive about the whole thing. Until this time.

We filled out the contact forms which said that they would contact us back within 5 to 7 business days. (It’s been that long now, still nothing, for the record.) That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s potentially a very large amount of revenue to us lost while waiting for a reply that may never come.

First I tried emailing my contact in their ad department. We’ve spent a large sum (for us) in ads. Probably more than they pay our contact in a couple years. No response. We then tried talking to some people who work on the credits team that we had dealt with (we were one of the first apps to integrate that) but they were unable to accomplish much and gave up rather quickly, telling us the app couldn’t be restored, and nor could the one developer account that had gotten locked out and couldn’t get past the security question to restore.

Out of curiosity I did some calculations from looking at our Google Analytics page and plugging in some numbers from my days of buying users via Facebook ads. Assuming that ads targeting our customers cost about the same as the ads I bought to get many of them (it’s probably pretty close) they’re making about $0.54 CPM running their platform adds alongside on our app. We’ve generated (according to Google Analytics) 1.26 billion pageviews. That means they’ve made about $681k off of our ads.

In fairness, it’s possible the CPM they make is nowhere near what I think it is, and also many pageviews come from our standalone website, so my math is probably an overestimate, but the point is they could easily afford to hire a few people to work full time to do nothing but answer my emails and they’d still be making a bundle off of us! That’s not even counting what we’ve spent in ads. And I’ve needed maybe two emails answered in the entire year, meaning one person could probably handle about 1,000 developers our size (which there aren’t).

So needless to say we were rather frustrated. Then right in the middle of this, Y Combinator announced their partnership with Facebook. I got the email of someone to contact, emailed him, and had the app fixed and back online within a matter of hours.

The moral of the story: Y Combinator just saved our bacon.

I’ve dealt with a lot of third parties since starting Blue Frog Gaming, and the quality of business dealings has, of course, run the gamut. Some companies are easily approachable, solve problems well, and are just overall positive experiences to work with. SuperRewards, for instance, fits into that category, and is much of why they are the leader in their space.

By far the most inept of them all is RockYou. I don’t know how these morons stay in business. If I were Sequoia, I’d be so embarrassed to have invested in them that I’d remove their logo from the portfolio page on my website.

Here’s a list of things they’ve done that prove their incompetence (not even counting them getting hacked for not implementing even basic security procedures that have been well-known for nearly a decade).

RockYou started off in the early days of the Facebook platform. Like Slide they were initially making apps that mimicked MySpace functionality that Facebook didn’t have, such as the ability to post pictures to your friends’ walls, upload videos, etc. Like Slide they got a lot of traction fast, and then quickly discovered that page views on Facebook are worth less than the HTML they’re printed on.

So they switched into running an ad service for Facebook developers. You can integrate their ads into your game and get paid. Or you can buy ads that will run inside other Facebook apps. We’ve done both, and I regret both.

The ads we purchased, to advertise our apps in others, had a pre-defined start and end date according to the contract we signed with them. Instead of stopping them at the stop date, they ran them for much longer and tried to bill us. This might seem like an easy mistake to make, but if you’ve ever used any ad management software, you know it isn’t. It’s entirely automated.

Then there’s the running ads. When we first started, they asked us for a W-9 form so they could report to the IRS the money they pay us. Standard procedure for just about anything, so no big deal. Then a few months later, they asked us for it again. I told them I had already sent it, I even found the email in my sent box, and the email from them saying that they had received it, but they didn’t have the form. So I sent it again. Then this week (many months and RockYou checks later) I got two more emails from different people in their organization asking for a W-9 form because they don’t have it. 

Is it really that difficult to have some basic file storage? The company has raised $129 million. They couldn’t spend $200 on a USB drive? My law firm, handles zillions of files from who knows how many clients, and I doubt they’ve ever lost one. They’re a big firm, but I also doubt they have $129 million to play with. If you’re running an ad network one of your chief responsibilities is to store a god-damned W-9 form for everyone you pay.

And then there’s the icing on the cake. These idiots have repeatedly sent emails to all of their developers by simply CC’ing them. The amount of spam I’ve received due to that more than negates any amount we’ve made off of their pitiful ads.

I can’t imagine what the company culture must be like to have such repeated, malicious stupidity occur. Everyone in the industry hates these buffoons. All I know is it must be coming from the top down. When every aspect of a large company appears to be run by chimpanzees, there’s something serious and systemic going wrong. If I were an investor there would be some pretty uncomfortable board meetings (and maybe there were as 2 of those were very public disasters). I’d also be trying to find a way to bail out and get my money back.

Long time no blog. I‘ve been meaning to find the time to write more, but I’ve been pretty busy. My startup is now up to 14 people, so that takes up a good chunk of the week. I’m near the end of a week-long vacation today, so it’s pretty much now or never.

I realized a few months back that I was slowly sinking into a state of misery, the root cause of which was not work (which is going pretty well) but the lack of anything outside of it. I’d pretty much go to work, go home, and often do work-related stuff there. I’d waste time by playing video games or watching TV, neither of which is very fulfilling in the long run.

I was definitely watching far more TV than I am accustomed to, though still probably 1/4^th of what the average American does, and it was only partially because we’re living in the golden era of television. I’m the rare person who doesn’t have a cable subscription but isn’t some sort of anti-television snob. I just don’t like that much of it, and what I do want to see, I can download.

Many people view TV as vastly inferior to reading, but personally I’m skeptical. I’m still not sold that the crap that most people read is really much better for the brain than the crap they watch on TV. I’ve read Dan Brown and I’ve seen about half an episode of American Idol, and if you asked me which one decreased my IQ by more, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an answer.

So I’ve pretty much ditched both television (easy to do in the summer when all of the good shows are on hiatus anyway) and video games in favor of more active and social activities. I’ve been golfing a decent amount, and recently joined a bowling league. I’ve deleted a number of RSS feeds from my Google Reader (pretty much everything that isn’t work-related) and started writing a novel. I’ve read a few books old-school paper style, and have used my commute to listen to a few more rather than constantly flipping from one bad rock station to another, so it’s been my most literate year in a long while.

All in all it’s been a solid improvement. I still need to fix a few things. For one, I need to exercise more. Golf isn’t too bad, especially if you’re walking, but it isn’t really what I’d call strenuous. Exhausting perhaps. Agitating, most definitely. But not really a workout.

For another, I need to travel more. That and not waking on an alarm are the only two things I miss from the professional poker days. I definitely can’t do the constant week-long getaways I used to back then (and the alarm clock situation is hopeless) but I could start taking advantage of long weekends and such.

I took a road trip to Chicago for a few days this week. I should have stayed longer. Chicago is the one big city I actually like. I wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s a great place to visit. The Shedd Aquarium is truly impressive, though since they ruined the show I may actually like Atlanta’s better. The pizza is to die for, and I say this as possibly the only American who doesn’t really like pizza very much. If a New Yorker ever tells you how good their pizza is, kick them in the genitals swiftly to prevent them from procreating. What they call a pizza on the East Coast would be considered merely a topping in Chicago.

And then there’s the blues. Somehow, despite being a white boy from Akron, I’ve been a blues fan for a long time, and on this vacation I had the closest thing to a religious experience I’ll likely ever get. I got to meet Buddy Guy. It turns out the club he’s owned for 20 years had just moved to a new space about a block from my hotel a couple weeks before I arrived. My wife was feeling ill Monday night so I walked over to see what was going on.

I walked in and found an open space at the bar. I looked to my right and sure enough there was Buddy in a cowboy hat. I eventually introduced myself to him, and told him that I was a big fan of Stevie Ray Vaughn, which was how I had initially found his music. Buddy talked a bit about Stevie, and playing that final concert with him in Alpine Valley (Vaughn died in a helicopter crash on the way back to Chicago right after an encore with Buddy, his brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, and Robert Cray). Then he politely excused himself, went up on stage, and played with the band for a bit.

Afterward he came back and reminisced a bit. I asked him if he’d lived in Chicago all his life, and he said he moved there in his early 20’s.

“To play the blues?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I just wanted to find a good job. Back then there wasn’t no money in the blues. You’d play and the audiences would be 99% black.”

He talked a bit more about how much times had changed since then. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have lived through what he’s lived through. He started out long before our nation began to make any real and lasting progress toward racial equity, toiling for decades in relative obscurity in an industry that was extremely exploitive of artists, especially black ones. Musicians like Hendrix, Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughn, whom he practically mentored, and blues-based rockers like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, who followed directly in his footsteps, became multiplatinum selling artists while he remained virtually unknown for three decades.

And now he’s a 74 year old black man in a nation with a black President who has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, won numerous Grammys, and owns a blues bar where 20-something white tourists like me come snap pictures of him with camera phones. While he was talking to me about how much more cars cost today than they did back then, I have to think that’s the least of the changes he’s seen.

Either way, he can still play a guitar like he could twenty years ago. And he’s a personable guy. He takes great pride in being so approachable, showing up at his club on a regular basis, signing autographs and taking pictures. I’m not really the autograph sort, but talking to the man I was as close to starstruck as I’ve ever been.

When I’d first walked in, a guy had made a space for me at the bar. I introduced myself and he said his name was Cortez. He told me a bit of his story over the next hour or so. Apparently he’d been a jazz drummer, but had stopped playing about 15 years prior. He’d had a job as an IT worker for a Chicago newspaper, and when he got laid of he’d decided to start playing again. Since he lived in Chicago he decided he might as well learn to play the blues.

Monday nights are jam nights at the club. After the opening act anyone who wants to can put their name and what instrument they play on a list and an emcee assembles bands from it. Blues is very much based on instrumental solos and vocal showmanship, deriving an infinite permutation of songs and experiences from just a few simple melodies, so it lends itself to jamming like no other genre. If you can just play three or four different songs and hold your own when it’s your turn to solo, you’re good to go.

I stuck around just long enough to see Cortez play. He was nervous but did a great job. I’m certainly no expert at evaluating drummers, but I’ve listened to a lot of blues music and he held his own.

Now I’m back and hoping to spend the rest of the week doing as little resembling work as possible, and maybe even bang out a couple chapters. Wish me luck.

Apparently I’m not the only one to think that letting your teenage daughter try to sail around the world on her own might not exactly win you the parent of the year award. The parents I mentioned yesterday have been criticized by a lot of people on the net.

Their response had me actually laughing at loud. It was

"Let’s face it. Life is dangerous.How many teenagers are killed in car accidents? … Should we stop every teenager from driving a car?"

This logic is astounding on so many levels. Most of all, there is the fact that he’s comparing driving a car (odds of death, one in millions for a normal person, two in millions for a teenager) to sailing around the world solo (odds of death, probably more likely than not). If you’re willing to make a comparison of apples to oranges, you could use that logic to justify any behavior at all.

“Why did you let your son jump out of a plane holding nothing but a Hefty Cinch Sack and a can of Mountain Dew?”

“Life is dangerous. How many people get hit by lightning every year. Should we all hide in giant Faraday cages every time it storms?”

or….

“Weren’t you worried about having unprotected sex with that stripper in Tijuana?”

“Life is dangerous. How many people die in terrorist attacks in America every century? Should we all just stop working in big buildings?”

Then there’s the fact that a lot of people actually do think we should stop every teenager from driving a car. They’re probably still a minority, but if we put banning sailing around the world by yourself on the ballot, it would win hands down.

And then there’s this quote:

"We don’t make any decisions just based on a feeling, or even on sound knowledge. We also pray about it. The conviction of prayer and answer to prayer has led to where we are with Abigail’s campaign."

The old “God said it was OK” argument. Even better. Basically what it comes down to is  they asked God “hey, is it OK if we let Abby try to sail around the world on her own? She’s like REALLY good with boats and stuff.” And God didn’t say anything (which seems to usually be His divine M.O. in these sorts of situations, though sometimes He mixes it up by giving a signal such as a bird chirping outside or some thunder in the distance) so they took that as the green light.

I just wonder if, when she was stranded and thought to be quite possibly dead, they started wondering things like “Wait, is there any difference between driving a car and sailing the world solo?” or “Shit, was that bird chirping a yes or a no. Why doesn’t God ever just answer in English?”

So I’m reading this story about the 16 year old girl who got lost trying to sail solo around the world and all I can think is
“how bad are this girl’s parents?” When I was 16 I couldn’t even get my dad to let me go to a Candlebox concert in Cleveland. ‘

I thought at the time, as kids often do, that he was perhaps a bit overprotective. I wasn’t sure what horrible things he thought could possibly happen to me, but whatever the worst of them was, it was probably better than the average result of attempting to sail around the world by yourself.

There’s certainly something to be said about granting your kid some amount of freedom. Believe me, I don’t claim to be some sort of expert on parenting. The closest I’ve come is owning 2 dogs, and neither of them listen to instructions very well. But I’m pretty sure that if your kid says “hey daddy, do you mind if I try to pilot a boat around the world by myself” the correct answer is “not while you’re living under this roof.”

Steve Jobs published a note called Thoughts on Flash today, almost certainly as a direct result of my previous post, HTML 5: Not any Time Soon, in which I pointed out that I think Apple is making a mistake by not supporting Flash on the iPhone and iPad.

Steve’s rebuttal contained a few points. Number one is that Flash isn’t open, it’s a proprietary standard (obviously true) and that for some reason Apple has decided that while everything else they produce should be a proprietary standard, web-based ones need to be open. It’s a double-standard with no clear reason as to why that one proprietary works everywhere but there, but it is what it is.

Ironically he then goes on to tout the performance benefits of using h.264, a proprietary video encoding standard that Apple relies on heavily. You can argue the finer points of video compression (whether Ogg Theora is sufficiently high quality at given bitrates, or potentially subject to potential IP problems) until you’re blue in the face, but you just cannot reconcile the fact that Apple feels that animated graphics and interactive interfaces need to be created in an open standard like HTML 5 but video in a proprietary one like h.264. Apple could create both a video compression standard (and open source it like they have with Webkit) and hardware encoder/decoders for it if they wanted, but they do not. Of course, they’re a member of the proprietary licensing group that collects h.264 licensing fees, so once again we’re left with Apple just wanting to use their proprietary standards.

Really what it comes down to is Apple is winning the latest version of the Great Technological Dick-Measuring Contest (heretofore abbreviated GTDMC): the app count. Apple can boast 180,00 apps or however many, a multiple of the number for Android and everyone else. Just like previous GTDMCs, including megapixels in digital cameras and clock speed on processors, the app store GTDMC is not at all meaningful by itself but sells product to the uninformed. Ask anyone who has sold electronics (I did back in the days of MP and GHz). Average Joe Sixpack doesn’t know or care about anything but the number.

This is the real reason Apple is banning anything not programmed in their developer tools from their devices. Really, who cares if later versions of the iPhone OS make your fart apps stop farting? Not Apple certainly. Probably not users either, they’ll just upgrade the ones that the developers felt valuable enough to upgrade and simply replace the rest. The average lifespan of any given app on a particular device is about that of the common houselfy, so I can’t imagine breaking compatibility is a concern to anyone involved.

What Apple doesn’t want, and Steve Jobs neglected to mention, is to let the App Store become a cheap commodity. If Adobe can make their Creative Suite export your flash program to an iPhone app, what’s to stop them from letting it export to an Android one, and a WebOS one, and a Blackberry one as well? The answer is nothing, in fact it’s almost certain they’d do this given that Adobe’s mission from day one, when they were doing this with printable documents, is to make it so that developers can write their code once and run it anywhere.

And then what happens to all of the exclusive “Made for iPhone apps”? Just as gaming console makers love games made solely for their platform, Apple wants your location sharing service to only run on iPhone. This is the real reason why they’re cramming Xcode down your throats.

Another point Steve-o (that’s what we call him at the poker table) makes is battery life. To me this is a fallacious argument. The device supporting Flash does not have to equal the device not supporting h.264. Battery life could be maintained, such as it is now, when viewing YouTube or any other site with h.264 files ready to go. And for sites that still have their content in only Flash for whatever reason (Hulu being the most notable by far) the customer can simply choose.

Also, if there’s one thing that Apple products have been notorious for it’s poor battery life. Apple was the first OEM, way back in the early days of the iPod, a line of products which has had worse battery life than every major competitor ever since its inception, to realize that people don’t really care about it that much. They just need enough to get through the day. The iPhone (like most smartphones with large screens) gets abysmal battery life compared to the clamshells everyone had before, and guess what, nobody cares. You just plug it in every night and you’re happy.

On the whole though, all of his points illustrate exactly why all of us web developers want Flash to die. Though most of the ones I’ve talked to tend to agree with my statement that it won’t happen soon, we’re all hoping it does. But that doesn’t mean it’s sensible to not support it now.

One of the big things everyone working on the web has been talking about recently is HTML 5. The concept has been simmering for a long time, but the iPad’s conspicuous lack of Flash support (on a device seemingly designed for sites that use it like Hulu or Kongregate) really brought awareness to the issue. Apple is almost certainly trying their damnedest to replace Adobe’s stranglehold on the net with something open.

In general, though, I’m skeptical this will work any time soon. Open standards bodies move abysmally slowly, and perhaps the only thing slower in software is corporate adoption of new browsers. And like it or not, a huge percentage of web surfing (enough that there’s almost never a business case for ignoring it) comes from corporate offices.

To put it in perspective, IE7 came out way back in 2006, and IE6, the bane of all web developers, is still holding solid at ~9% market share. IE7 is at 14%, even though IE8 came out over a year ago. The reasons for this are simple. Corporations have software (intranets, CMSes, etc) built at a certain time for a certain browser, and upgrading to a new browser involves expense with absolutely no benefit at all. Anything your employees need to do at work can be done in IE6. And if Facebook doesn’t support it, well, you don’t pay your employees to use Facebook. (I do, but not everyone makes Facebook games for a living).

When you get down the business case, building your web apps in HTML 5 vs. Flash comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. If either were an equally costly solution, you’d probably use HTML 5 for most things. It’s a better developer experience, and a better user experience. It’s almost always a win-win. In fact in most cases, Flash is probably more costly. It’s brutal to develop in (relative to something like Ruby on Rails) and often requires you to deliver larger files to accomplish anything than you otherwise would have to.

But on the web, scale is large and both marginal and fixed costs are so low as to be irrelevant. If you’re making the next Farmville, whatever extra costs are involved in supporting IE6 and 7 right now are made up for 1,000x over by the extra 25% of customers.

So let’s suppose the best case here. HTML 5 gets ratified formally tomorrow. IE9 comes out tomorrow too, with full support. How long is it until the cost benefit analysis says that developers aren’t shooting themselves in the foot to make their games in a canvas rather than Flash? The answer is years even then, and HTML 5 won’t get ratified tomorrow (and probably not even this year) and IE9 won’t support much of it when it does happen.

So I think Apple is making a big mistake with their avoidance of Flash. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping I’m wrong, because I’d love to see Flash die as much as the next guy, but I’m not holding my breath. The web evolves very slowly, and Android (on which Flash should ship sometime this year) is such a serious competitive threat now that it just doesn’t feel like it’s right to lose on feature.

I suppose there you have two competing long-term goals. One long-term goal is to get a bloated, non-open standard the hell of the internet, which would benefit just about everyone other than Adobe. The other is to win the smart phone land grab, the way Windows did with desktop computers. I think if it were me I’d err on the side of the latter, especially since it’s not clear their actions can tip the balance for the former. It’s possible that Apple could have Flash now and still see a future, 5-10 years down the road, in which it’s dead. I feel like if I were them, or Microsoft, I’d do what I could to support HTML 5 as soon as possible, and as well as possible, and then just wait it out.

I went to Best Buy Saturday and got to play around with the iPad a little bit. My initial impression was that it’s pretty much exactly what it looked like: a big-ass iPod Touch.

There are a few immediately obvious ramifications of the much larger size. For one, web browsing is much less unpleasant. On a phone-sized screen there’s all this pinching and zooming, and slow loading even on Wi-Fi. It’s painful. The iPad is large enough that it’s substantially better.

It also feels much faster. I don’t know what’s under the hood, but you get the feeling that the larger form factor allowed for a better processor, probably because it could fit a much larger battery. It’s pretty responsive.

The larger size changes the keyboard as well. It’s kind of awkward really because the device is too large to allow for thumb typing, Blackberry style, like you would on the iPhone, but even in landscape mode it’s much too small to just sit down on a table and type on like a normal keyboard. I think on the whole it might actually be worse than typing on a phone-sized screen just because it feels like it should be better and isn’t. I hate virtual keypads though, so if you’re one of those nut jobs who claims to like typing on an iPhone as much as a normal keyboard, your mileage might vary.

If you’re not a total fanboy, you might not care for it too much, but probably won’t hate it simply because you won’t be doing too much typing. The device is not going to replace your laptop. The lack of multitasking ensures that. Using a Palm Pre has me spoiled, and I kept clicking the center button to switch from one task to another only to find it close what I was using. I guess if I were an iPhone user I wouldn’t have that problem, but I still wouldn’t be leaving my Lenovo at home on a trip. The iPad might be used in its place on the plane though.

Reading on it is much like reading on a computer monitor, and a good one. Great for short periods, but I don’t think I’d want to read a novel on it but for just a little web surfing or news browsing it’s fantastic. So if you’re using a Kindle, I don’t think the iPad’s going to replace it, anymore than your iPod replaced your vinyl collection. It’s just a different style of device.

It lacks Flash, which is unfortunate because the screen is large enough that casual games might be great on it. I tried watching Hulu on it and couldn’t, which made me frown, but there’s a YouTube app so if Avril Lavigne videos are your thing, you’re set. In fact this might be the ultimate kittens-on-treadmills viewing device.

The guy at Best Buy said they had gotten in 25 of each model. The cheapest one (16 GB) sold out but the others were still in stock. I suspect the vast majority of the demand will be at the lowest price point, and that’s understandable. Overall the iPad seems like a cool toy but not much more. And, not $500 cool.

If it were $200 I could see it having a place in the living room. I don’t think I’d ever bother taking it anywhere (expect maybe a plane, which it seems almost designed for) because it’s not much better than a phone for casual browsing on the go. But for Googling to find out what happened in the previous episode of Lost while you’re watching the current one and eating cheese straight from the can in your recliner, you really can’t beat a big-ass iPod Touch.