[qrcodetag size="150" link="false"/]We’ve started to implement an App for an Austrian band (Alkbottle) that should provide the ability for users to upload short video clips to Facebook. However, after a little web research, we found out that this feature is not very well supported by the Facebook iPhone API. It appears to be buggy and there are a number of workarounds which were partially successful. We suggested to our customer to move away from Facebook and use their own servers for hosting the video material. From our perspective, this has several advantages. First and foremost, you do not depend on Facebook. If Facebook decides to remove all content (for whatever reason), there is no possibility to stop them. In signing up with Facebook, you give up the right to control your data. Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to bother most companies, who are otherwise very concerned about their data. And second of all, you can design your web presence yourself. Facebook puts strong limitations on the design of your “personal” Facebook page. Frankly, all Facebook pages look the same to us. The only notable difference between them is the profile picture. This is very intriguing since companies are typically interested in their cooperate identity and spend lots of money on it.
All in all the Facebook hype works for companies like all other hypes before: if competing companies have it, we also need to have it. Critical thinking about potential implications? Almost zero. The only company that really has a benefit: Facebook. You have to congratulate them for their cleverness.
your ikangai team
ps: yes, you can find us on Facebook, too 
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