Facebook problem

I was alerted to a potential problem on here by blog addict regular reader Veronica Cobley who panicked when not being able to get her hit of 6000 miles… on her cellphone yesterday.

After some rudimentary investigations, it became evident that the issue wasn’t with the blog per se, but rather getting from Facebook  to the blog, especially on a mobile device. This message came up:

Either this application has not configured its Mobile Web URL or the URL could not be verified as owned by the application. Unable to redirect.

That’s not good.

But it’s not my fault, nor is it a new thing as this page from stackoverflow.com indicates:

I think this is something Facebook broke very recently (perhaps even today?). When a user clicks on any links to our app from inside the Facebook native iOS app, they get this error “Either this application has not configured its Mobile Web URL or the URL could not be verified as owned by the application. Unable to redirect.” We had never set a Mobile Web URL previously, and everything had been fine since we launched the app over a year ago. We sent all mobile clicks to the same URL’s as desktop browsers and handled the mobile rendering server-side. We have not changed our application domain inside the App Settings or anything like that.

In the App Settings, can set a Mobile Web URL to our homepage and the link works (and the error message goes away) but that’s not the desired behavior at all – it would mean that all links end up at the same Mobile Web URL regardless of what the link was!

Was this change made on purpose by Facebook and if so why? There’s been no mention of this whatsoever on the Developer Blog.

Update: I’ve since found this to be a widespread problem, not just for a few apps. Just by clicking around I’ve seen this error on posts to weather.com, youtube, msn.com and a dozen others. It happens on both clicks from the Timeline as well as the News Feed (although strangely sometimes the same post works on one, but not the other!), and from the m.facebook.com mobile web app as well as the native iOS app.

I commented on http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/302635863137683 but no word from Facebook yet. I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about this right now, this is a major bug.

That page is from March this year, and it seems to have been fixed since then, as this has only surfaced again recently.
Hopefully then, Facebook can fix it again.

The irony is that those people who link to the blog via Facebook won’t be able to read this because they won’t be able to link to the blog via Facebook. This makes me sad and I will be demanding a full refund of my Facebook fees from Mark Zuckerberg.