Facebook Developers

So, I mentioned before that we were working on a partnership for the usage of historical data on our site (a couple people asked), but it turns out that potential partnership was actually a legal trap.

A little over a week back, we searched for a source of historical app data to share with you guys on developeranalytics.com.  There were a couple options, but most had some fairly strict rules.  Adonomics.com, on the other hand, had the following in their FAQ:

Can I use your data?
Sure, but it's Facebook's data, not mine. I'm just making it pretty. You can download the raw data in a CSV format, which every spreadsheet or stats application understands. All I ask in return is that you include a link back to this site.

We did just that to fill in gaps in the historical data presented to developers about their apps, and shortly after posting on this forum to ask for some opinions of the site, we were contacted by Jesse Farmer and Lee Levenson of Adonomics with a very kind e-mail:

Hello Charles,

Nice work on Developer Analytics.  It's very well put together.

We noticed, however, that you've been downloading our data twice daily
(once around midnight CST and once around noon CST).  As per our FAQ
we don't want people using the data we collect for commercial purposes
or to build a competing service without our permission.  If you're
interested in licensing the data or working with us in any other way
please contact Lee Lorenzen, who is CC'd on this email.

We'd like to find a way to work together.

Cheers,
Jesse
CTO, Adonomics

When we received this email, the Adonomics FAQ page was changed to:

Can I use your data?
Yes, if you're using it for non-commercial and non-competitive purposes and include a link back to Adonomics. If you want to use the data commercially contact sales@adonomics.com.

We immediately stopped pulling data from Adonomics.com and informed them we had promptly done so.  We then started pulling data directly scraped from Facebook's public about pages (yes, that's how you do it:P)

I then spoke with Lee Levenson over the phone, and asked him what he would like us to do.  He presented several options, and one of the options I presented was "worst case scenario, we can just remove all the data from our site."  He said that would work, but asked us to send him an email with a list of what we intended on doing or not doing with the information because he was concerned about setting a precedent for other sites to download their information, and that he wanted to make a public press release about a partnership between us to prevent that.  Excited about a potential partnership, we responded as follows:

Hi Lee,

So we just wrapped up our discussion, and this is essentially a brief summary:

Our Intentions:

-create a welcoming community for social network application developers
-provide a forum for communication and collaboration to help new and old application developers develop their ventures
-build a central hub where developers can review and assess different companies (ad networks, app companies, etc.)
-keep developers up to date with facebook related news

What we don't intend on doing:

-selling historical application statistics to third parties
-make monetary valuations of apps based on historical application statistics

As you can see, we are travelling in a drastically different direction than Adonomics is, and I doubt we will be clashing anytime in the future.

I personally don't know what exactly you guys want us to do or not do, but if you just send us a list of things you are concerned about, I'm sure that would make things easier to settle upon.

All we are currently using historical data for is the little chart that we show in the app details.  Nowhere else on our site is any of the historical data presented.

I know you are concerned about this setting a precedent for others to repeat, but we would be very happy to release something publicly about a partnership between us.  It would be a great way to establish a precedent for licensing procedures for this data as well, which I believe would be advantageous for you guys.  We would be very happy to include a link on our site, as well as refer our users to adonomics for your valuations.

Let me know what you guys want to happen,

-Charles

We received no response for a while, until I sent a reminder email:

Hey Lee,

Just wanted to make sure you received my last e-mail.

Let us know what you guys want us to do.

-Charles

upon which we finally received a response:

Charles,

I’ve been under the weather with the flu since last week and am just getting to my e-mail today.

I will be working tomorrow and will check in with the team and see what next steps make sense.

Thanks,
Lee

We waited for a response, while Jesse Farmer posted several encouraging words in our threads about our website, until we received another email from Lee:

Charles,

I am feeling better – thanks for asking.

WRT the new site design for our “Next Generation Adonomics??  site, I’m glad you liked it.  J   

While competitive fever (vs. flu fever) may be one motivating factor for upgrading our look-and-feel, the style of the upgrade was influenced by http://developers.facebook.com/get_started.php and http://joyent.com/developers/facebook/a … celerator/  and our desire to make it easy for the 200,000+ developers who use these sites to navigate the Adonomics site.   I assume you had similar goals and stylistic influences when you designed your site.

I think where we come down WRT your extraction from our site of our organized lists of Facebook stats via a massive download of every single application’s data (which we never intended to allow or even think that someone might try to do) and you’re lack of any public acknowledgement of Adonomics as the source of this data once you had done it, is that we are willing to create a license for you that covers this past copyright infringement and allow you to continue to use the data for your site.  The alternative of enforcing our rights via litigation is not one we want to pursue at this time, but we reserve that right if we can’t come to terms WRT a license.

The rate card for licensing our historical facebook app data for a company your size is a fee of $800 per month with a minimum term of one year and with six month pre-payment requirement ($4,800).  The monthly fee is based on your company’s monthly revenue, as shown below:

Monthly Revenue                       Monthly Data License Fee
=============                      ===================
$0 to $50,000                            $800 (six-month pre-pay, minimum one year term)
$50,000 to $250,000                  $1,600
$250,000 to $1,000,000              $3,200
$1,000,000 to $5,000,000           $6,400
$5,000,000+                              $10,000

Our data is not available anywhere else in such a straightforward form, structure, look and feel.  This data is also important for any site that wishes to launch with a claim of being a Next Generation Adonomics site and to give the complete historical picture of Facebook apps.  It is also not in our interest to see potential competitors surface, so I feel even offering this rate card without non-compete clauses is quite reasonable.  Lastly, it is not enough to just purge your site of our data now because you have gained initial traction using it.  Obviously, if we wanted to launch a book selling site, if we took all of Amazon’s reviews and launched with them on our site built up our user base and then later removed them after we had enough of our own, it would still be unfair to Amazon.

Assuming you sign a license on these terms before the end of this month, we will make the terms and start date retroactive to when you took the data and we will give you a signed release from any future claims related to this matter.

Please let me know how you wish to proceed.

Thanks,
Lee

This was the first time we actually received a direct request to take down the information, and we have immediately done so out of respect for their wishes.  Technically we're under no obligation to do so given the permissions given to us by Adonomics' ToS at the time we pulled the information, but as developers we understand the effort that goes into stuff like this and do not wish to disrespect theirs.

On the other hand, from the tone of their most recent email it seems as if they wish to take legal action against us, even though we promptly removed information that their original ToS permitted us to use as soon as they informed us they wished that we take it down.  To me, this seems very unfair, and very intentional.  Their delays in responding to us let us continue to "gain traction" as stated in the email while their historical information was still available on the site (when we would have immediately taken it down had they asked us previously).

We feel we've been very cooperative in this whole situation, and we hope that this post will put everything in the open to the developer community.  We're 3 developers who don't want to get sued even after being cooperative and prompt.  I'm not sure what they could sue us for, but we don't have the resources to defend ourselves even if the lawsuit were to be frivolous.

We've responded with:

Hey Lee,

Unfortunately we don't have any resources to draw upon to pay licensing fees of that magnitude (you know our situation).  When we used the data from your site, your Terms of Service explicitly permitted us to do so (we have sufficient evidence to prove that it did).  When the Adonomics ToS was changed, we immediately stopped pulling data from your site.  Out of respect for your wishes, we spoke to you previously over the phone about what you wanted us to do.  The lack of our public acknowledgement of Adonomics as the source of the data was due to us waiting on your response so we would know how to make that acknowledgement occur since you stated in previous conversations that we might reach an agreement in the near future.  Therefore we left the information on the site for that period of time until further instruction.

The site has not yet been publicly launched, nor would I consider "beta testers" drawn from the developer testing forum to be "traction."

We have been very cooperative with you, and we even asked if you would like us to remove the content from our site on previous occasions.  We received no response to that question until now.  I believe that we have handled this situation as quickly and as cooperatively as possible.  If you would like, we would be willing to make a public statement that we used information from Adonomics for the time period the information was available.

All Adonomics historical data will be removed from the site within 24 hours per your request.

Thank you, and glad to hear you're feeling better.

-Charles

PS. If there's any legal folk out there, do please let us know what you think.

I understand the need that these big companies have for keeping competition at bay, but I would have hoped it would be done so by building out a better product (capitalism at work?) as opposed to trapping us into committing to a monthly licensing fee that we can't afford.  I feel like something unjust has been done to us, kind of like when the source code to one of my other projects was stolen a while back (which was why I got out of the facebook app game for a while in the first place).

The reason why I'm putting all this in the open is that I'm scared of what a company with the backing of Altura Ventures can do against us without other developers behind us.  That being said, we have that advanced stats feature ready for you guys to check out, including app user overlap and app user affinity, if this ever blows over.  I know I mentioned earlier we'd have it out today, but we're going to have to push that down at least til tonight or tomorrow morning due to this stuff.

Last edited by charles (2008-02-14 19:35:40)