Facebook recently killed off all of the API’s and methods that My Greetings was originally written with. This means the application no longer works and the amount of time to rewrite it would be exorbitant. We’re sad to see it go as well!
My Greetings was the first Facebook application that I wrote and the reason that I wrote it was because all of the other greetings-style apps simply generated SPAM with “requests” send to your friends and the apps were jam packed with advertising. They also required to you slowly “unlock” greetings by sending more and more of them.
At the time, Facebook’s app platform was based on what they called FBML (Facebook Markup Language). They had all sorts of Facebook-specific commands that let you fairly easily put together an app. They weren’t supposed to official kill off FBML apps until June 1, 2012, but they have already abandoned so many of the FBML commands that apps written using them no longer work.
Facebook is now pushing javascript-based “iframe” applications and the new “open graph” API’s. I have rewritten all of our other applications using these methods, but it has taken a massive amount of time. I can see why they are going in this direction because javascript is a much more widely adopted language for web-based apps. However, there are many things that used to be very simple in FBML that now require a ton of programming or aren’t even possible at all.
I still like the idea of a simple greetings application for Facebook and may consider adding greetings to one of my other apps, such as My Status or the newer XtremelySocial app. Those apps both let you update your status and post on your friend’s walls, but they are text-based only for now.
