Facebook Developers

If what I understand is correct this change will eliminate completely the concept of a "Network ID".  While I understand the need to move to a city format rather than a region format (eg Australia is currently all one network), using a user-defined field (City) as the only way to group users by location is a move in the wrong direction and is going to force us to have to duplicate a lot of current-Facebook functionality.

If you are going to move from regions to cities that is fine and dandy but we need something that corresponds with a Network ID.. maybe come up with something like a City ID.

Otherwise it is going to be a nightmare to group by city.  Not only will we have to either come up with our own City ID for our application to store in our databases but we will also run into major problems differentiating between user-defined entries like the following:

St. Louis
St Louis
Saint Louis
STL
The Gateway City
Gateway to the West
The Mound
Mound City
The Lou

All of these cities should ideally be grouped together.. but since this field is user defined there is no way we are going to be able to do that grouping well.

And really, what good is it to split users into arbitrary localities in their metropolitan area?  For example, if asked to list my city I would probably pick "Des Moines" [others would say DM or DSM or even "Da Moin!!!!"] even though I live in a suburb.  My next door neighbor might pick "Urbandale" and the kid who lives two blocks down "Waukee".  For all practical purposes these should be treated as the same city programatically.  I can't really think of any reason to split them up inside an application.  If you want to share something with people in "Urbandale" you probably also want to share it with people in "Waukee".. and also with the people who live in those two suburbs who have their city listed as "Des Moines".

There need to be rigidly defined groups that this field can fall under if it is to be at all useful.

Last edited by Yeldarb (2009-07-02 05:51:49)