Social Media

Social media has evolved considerably since I started MyFlightbook in 2006.  Facebook had only just begun to be open to people outside of universities.

Since at least early 2010, MyFlightbook has supported the use of a technology called "oAuth" to post to Facebook and to Twitter on your behalf.  The idea behind oAuth is it allows a user of two web services to give one permission to perform operations on the other without the user's involvement.  In other words, you could tell Facebook or Twitter to allow MyFlightbook to post to your Facebook/Twitter feed.  OAuth provided a secure way to do this, that would constrain what MyFlightbook could and couldn't do, and would let you revoke those permissions at any time.  MyFlightbook also uses oAuth for cloud storage integration - allowing you to back up to DropBox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.

The advantage of this is precisely that this can happen without the user.  Backing up your logbook to Dropbox can happen in the middle of the night while you sleep.  In the case of social media, you could check a box and your flight would be posted to your Twitter or Facebook feed as a side-effect of saving a flight.

Today I'm announcing the retirement of this functionality.

While not the biggest reason, the most immediate reason, is, to be honest, frustration with Facebook's developer app review process and their utter lack of responsiveness to questions. They are changing their policies as of Aug 1, and in reviewing MyFlightbook, they are making demands that are not appropriate for the functionality I want to provide. Plus, the functionality has always suffered from the time-expiration of authorization, so after a while, your post-as-side-effect-of-saving fails. (Twitter, interestingly, has worked flawlessly and seamlessly for 7 years or so now...)

And looking at the stats, fewer than 1% of you have authorized FB on the site, and fewer than 0.3% have authorized Twitter.

And this functionality is long in the tooth anyhow. You've always been able to manually post a flight (along with a comment that you edit) using the web, and that functionality continues.

Interestingly, the main benefit to the post-as-a-side-effect-of-saving functionality was actually on the mobile apps, where in 2010 most people did not have the Facebook or Twitter app on their phone (and even if they did, inter-app communication was very limited). But now everybody does, along with a bunch of other social networks (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., though strangely Google Plus seems to be following Windows Phone's market share trajectory...)

For this reason, the latest updates to the Android and iOS apps have removed the checkboxes, and replaced it with functionality that allows you to (manually) share a flight to...any app you like, be it Twitter, Facebook, Email, WhatsApp, or whatever else comes along

Today I am removing the corresponding "checkbox side effect" functionality from the web.  The web will continue to have "Share to Facebook" and "Share to Twitter", and of course you can always manually copy the link out of the browser window and share it wherever you like.  Generally, the link you want to share is the "ViewPublicFlight.aspx" link that you get if you click on the route of flight in the main logbook listing.