Marketing Ninja

A week or so ago I wrote yet another post full of Facebook application development tips (and believe me there will be several more to come), and I mentioned using Facebook test accounts to assist in development. After a week or two of actual using the accounts extensively I must tell you that they are not all they are cracked up to be.

Why do we have test accounts in the first place?

Facebook enabled developers to create test accounts namely to spare the developer’s friends from becoming guinea pigs for new application development, as this blogger argues. However, test accounts fall far short of eliminating that burden upon the friends of developer’s entirely.

Reasons why Facebook test accounts suck

1. It’s another freaking login you need to keep track of to manage a Facebook account. You need to create yet another new, real Facebook account, complete with a valid email address. I already have two Facebook accounts, one for managing my professional contacts and carrying out all of my Facebook application development and another account for managing my high school and college friends.

   I originally chose to separate my accounts simply because I wanted to be able to easily separate professional and social contacts; to put up a wall between them, so to speak. I’m not so bothered by the fact that I now have a THIRD Facebook account to help me test, but I had to put this point on the list as it is an obvious irritant associated with creating a new Facebook account.

2. You aren’t supposed to interact with regular Facebook users with a test account – Ok, so if I have an application designed to INTERACT WITH OTHER USERS, then can’t some of this behavior be construed as a violation of the test account terms of service? Fail.

3. You can’t friend users with a test account If I have a brand new, fresh test account and I need to have X number of friends in order to test a feature (like if I want to see my friends’ recent activity) then a test account simply will not suffice. Fail.

4. If you’re building an application in developer-only mode, you can’t even use test accounts because you can’t add them as developers, because that’s a violation of the terms of service. Say goodbye to developer-only mode if you want to use test accounts.

In short, these Facebook application test accounts are a waste of time, and don’t bother using them until Facebook provides some additional, unique incentive (like debug messages) to use them.

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