It’s almost incredible to believe that Facebook application developers have put up with using discussion forums to report, discuss and track bugs in the Facebook Platform while it is in constant use by 40million+ users but Facebook have finally launched a Bugzilla based bug tracking site.

One might be forgiven for thinking they survived this long because the platform API is rock solid but their tendency to roll out nightly updates that break very visible platform APIs every few days contradicts that slightly. We scratched our head for few hours a while back when the mock Ajax APIs that our application profile boxes were using suddenly started presenting the user with misleading error dialog boxes, only to find out that the platform API had accidentally been busted the previous night. I’d imagine there’s been a lot of time wasted by a lot of application developers over the past year while tracking down similar incidents but they have been incredibly patient in waiting this long.

One thing I would love Facebook to add is a FBML tag that gives the application developers extra debug/trace info while running/debugging their application but until now I’ve had no decent way to know if something like this isn’t already in the works. Something like a fb:is-app-developer, or a magic debug/trace div beneath the application div might be nice. Or they could just open source their FBML->HTML rendering engine and then 3rd parties could go about developing decent tools to aid debugging (I suspect this is already being reverse engineered though anyway…)

Better later than never though I suppose.