There was a problem generating the Feed story from the provided data – Facebook gives headache to developers once again

Sep 28, 2011 by Inteist

Today I noticed that users of the Android app started experiencing problem with posting to Facebook, getting the following error:

There was a problem generating the Feed story from the provided data

There have already been a few threads on StackOverflow like this one for iOS and this one for Android.

It definitely like a problem Facebook created (once again – sigh)… I will try to update this entry with a resolution once there is one. Hopefully though Facebook developers will just fix this bug on their end as there are a lot of developers (including myself) who had their code working for months with no problems until today.

You can see the status of the bug and add yourself to the list here. Although the bug is open just for iOS, once fixed for iOS, it should be also fixed for Android.

If you happen to know how to fix this, please leave your response in the comments and I will update this entry so that others can fix this problem for their users in the meantime.

UPD: 6:45 EST – it seems that the problem has been resolved! Yey! Hopefully some users will realize that we (the developers) are not the ones to blame (most of the time) that Facebook integration suddenly stopped working. Hopefully the ones that realize this will stop giving bad ratings on App Store and Android Market because of that.

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Windows 8 “contracts” what’s the fuss is all about

Sep 26, 2011 by Inteist

So I just heard about the upcoming “contracts” concept for future versions of Microsoft products (the contracts will probably get propagated at least partially into virtually all Microsoft products like Windows Phone, XBox, Tablet OS versions etc). The general idea seems to be that various applications will be able to share data and communicate otherwise not really disclosing too much about their functionality.

It is exciting news yeah, but why does it so painfully reminds me of Android “intents” system? To me it is exactly the same. Although some sources say it has some ideas similar to what former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s proposed as the “universal clipboard” concept — dating back to 2006. I still find it hard to see how this is different from Android’s intents system. It would be interesting to watch who sues who over that if at all. The huge piles of patents Google and Microsoft have do not make much sense to go to war over this.

It is interesting though to see how one of the most important features/ideas of Android OS gets propagated into other operating systems.

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