Traxo, one of the companies featured in the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit this week and a fledgling trip planning and itinerary management service, is one of many firms that suffers when the tech-heads at Facebook fancy a change.

Founder and chief exec at Traxo, Andres Fabris, fresh from unveiling his new company to the wider travel industry, says Facebook notified Traxo a few weeks ago that it would be changing the protocols associated with its Connect tool.

Now this might sound a bit trivial to some but, as Fabris admits: “It’s a pain the butt.”

He stresses that the change will not have an impact on the Traxo service but being at the whim of engineers at Facebook creates problems.

The Facebook Connect API is used by Traxo – and countless others – to handle the sharing tools central to its platform. It pulls in content from Facebook to the website and vice versa.

Facebook, of course, has good intentions with the changes, but giving third party sites using Connect just a month or so (deadline, end of the year) to upgrade their system could potentially be problematic.

This could be even more of a difficulty for larger firms using the system where their code releases are often scheduled weeks or even months ahead of time.

In the Traxo case, Fabris says its size (ie small) and agile development team will be able to make the changes within a few weeks.

Related posts:

TripIt-Facebook hooked, real-time capabilities of social networks irresistable

Industry First alert: group travel organising via Facebook?

Why the fuss over Twitter when Facebook is the place for travel?