Facebook Developers

Communicating with the verification team seems almost impossible - their email system doesn't work properly and they wont give out the name of the person dealing with my application or any contact phone number. All the emails they send me are anonymous and unsigned making it impossible to hold a conversation. Most of the emails I send them disappear into a black hole or seemingly get delayed a week then end up not being delivered to the same person who I was replying to. They offered to phone me at a pre-arranged time but it has proved impossible because they want to organise it by email and their email system doesn't work! If it takes a week to exchange one email, we can't arrange a time for a call within a week!

We've paid a lot of money for a service we're just not getting -

FACEBOOK - PLEASE GIVE US THE NAME, DIRECT EMAIL AND DIRECT PHONE NUMBER OF THE PERSON DEALING WITH OUR APP.

Last edited by chrisclaydon (2009-03-05 18:39:43)

We've been contemplating what is seemingly a very small investment to join the Verification program. We've mulled it over sometime in countless business meetings because it seems it would add value but at the same time we are a company that believes in transparency and what we've seen thus far communication wise has been fully lacking from the verification team. At first we took the complaints with a grain of salt thinking that the team was simply attempting to get organized but as time passes and we see more of these posts it becomes harder and harder for us to justify even applying for the program. Sure the "benefits" are nice but what they are exactly have not been communicated. Sure the price is low... but for what exactly and when. It is hard for us to give money to someone without a clue on exactly what we would be delivered and when it would be delivered. Delays happen, products get pushed back all of the time. That is what happens when you are trying to deliver the best experience but Facebook has much to learn in the way of communication. Simply ignoring a thread until it becomes a mild uproar is not a good way to conduct business and gives everyone involved a bad taste that eventually leads further to those contemplating (such as us) seeing these sort of threads and really debating what the benefit to us would be.

I have absolutely no clue, so I 'm gonna take a wild guess that it launches on March 18

I can't wait to see what's considered verified. If there's one spammy Slide, watercooler, etc app on there, it will invalidate the whole system.

tilibom wrote:

Is is a truly wild guess or you did a response on email sent 7 days ago?

i was bluffing, trying to catch the Team's attention.

Matt, what scale are we talking about, is it a matter of weeks, months or more? i 've sent an email, but never heard back

My app got verified a while back. It took about 8 days between my submission and the email that the app passed verification. Facebook charged me only $1 back then (with the expectation to charge the balance once the program launches0. Asking for a refund of this dollar just because the program is not live yet seems to be a steep response.

The email that was used to communicate during the verification didn't use a personal name (something like application-verification+xxxx@facebook.com), however one of my business partner from another project ran into the Facebook employee that was testing my app at the last developer garage, so Facebook is using humans for the verification :-)

The process is really straight forward, you explain what your app does, Facebook looks at it and if there are any concerns they will ask you to fix them. Pretty simple and a dollar well spent.
Once the Verification is live I hope to reach a few more users than I would otherwise then I am more than happy.

That's all you can tell us?  No timeframe?  Days, Weeks, Months, Years?

why would they be so secretive about it? do they want to 'surprise' us or are they afraid something will leak to their competitors?

personally I don't expect it to offer much, however we need to know whether it was worth the effort. every minute that goes by competing apps can get an advantage over us, simply because they are free to push the limits of communication channels away, while we are bound by the verification compliance terms for more than a month without receiving any benefits. i have no problem with the strict requirements of the program (even if they sound too strict, given the state of the platform) - but i feel outright scammed here.

i 'm giving it this week, then i 'm dropping out of the program. it sounds reasonable and financially sound for me.