Improving the FB developer ecosystem
Facebook and its third-party developers have certainly had their conflicts, and I admire facebook for attempting to herd such a wild bunch of cats. Still, there are some minor features that could significantly improve the developer experience AND the quality of user statistics facebook is able to gather. Facebook desires true user statistics — what user behavior is by demographic, for instance. Facebook has made it known that it does not want developers to link their developer accounts to “real” accounts, and its recent moves to “auto-correct” email addresses that are close matches to known email addresses has presented a burden to developers that follow an account–1@mail.net, account–2@mail.net, etc pattern.
I would love to see Facebook designate developer accounts and integrate these into the app development interface. Facebook users that have the developer application installed, should be able to create new developer accounts from within the developer app. These special developer accounts would only be friend-able with other developer accounts, and would allow easy account switching from within the Facebook chrome. These accounts would have auto-generated passwords and derivative email address (e.g. original–fbdev1@originalmail.com) and that can be used to recreate the conventional log-in experience.
Facebook would get clean user statistics by delineating a clear fake-account population, and developers would have an easy way to manage their various developer personas when developing multi-user experiences.
