Near the end of October 2010, I had this crazy idea that we should do a New Years Resolution application on Facebook. I looked around and couldn't find any that were really popular. Something like this seemed right up MeYou Health's alley. The self-introspection that occurs while you think about yourself and your goals for the year is a healthy act. It also tends to be a social act as others ask you what your resolution is to sometimes get ideas for their own.
Many people like to make fun of New Year resolutions... but I find most of those arguments to be largely over semantics. Whether you call it a yearly goal, a yearly challenge, a personal improvement project or whatever you want to call it, the act of assessing yourself and your life as you think about the coming year is something that we all do. Humans are big on fresh starts.
So in the course of a few weeks we found a company to build it, worked through the concepts and set a launch date of Dec 30th. We nailed the launch date and things were looking good. We seeded the product with a few users, and the numbers started to climb. As we entered New Years Eve, things were looking up. People were joining, sharing, inviting en-masse... it looked to be close to taking off...
And then we were banned.
We didn't realize we were banned, but at some point during the night while we all slept, we awoke to find that our application had been deleted from Facebook. All the ad money we had turned on was being wasted as it funneled people right into an error message for over 10 hours.
The specifics aren't important. What was terrible is that we were not notified abotu this. We were not told why we were banned so we didn't know what to fix. At first we thought there might have been some sort of accident (did one of us delete the app?) so we rebuilt the app and re-deployed it only to have it banned again. After the second ban, we went in and changed a bunch of features to essentially remove the ability to rapidly invite your friends or ask for support.
As of now, the app is still up... and we never really heard from Facebook on why we were banned. We believed we were following the terms of service. We were respecting the invite throttles. We were properly messaging users when they were inviting too much (and preventing them from inviting further). In the end we made a pretty minor change so that, instead of our app sending the invite, we let Facebook send the invite on behalf of the app. That seems to be working.
So New Years day was pretty crazy as we scrambled to pull our app back from the dead. We were offline during the primary time it was suppose to be up, but I guess we learned something: You better play nice with the machine learning algorithm robots at Facebook, or they will attack when you least expect it. Maybe next year when we release it as My Resolution 2012, we will be ready!
Happy New Year everyone! It isn't to late to make your resolution!
Comments