The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#2FB seems to have a two tiered developer program. There are the peons, the guys forced to toil away trying to figure out how to make the stuff work by doing exactly what is described in the blog. And then there are the anointed: the big companies or YC-related startups that enjoy special access to FB employees to get the answers they need.
For now it doesn't seem to really be harming FB. They enjoy extreme growth and developers are pulled to their platform because of their enormous gravity. Over time, however, it is really not sustainable. If they want to be a platform they should start acting like a platform and that means making sure their APIs are documented properly and developers have a way to seek out information they need. Microsoft, whether you like them or not, does a great job of this.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#3FB seems to have a two tiered developer program. There are the peons, the guys forced to toil away trying to figure out how to make the stuff work by doing exactly what is described in the blog. And then there are the anointed: the big companies or YC-related startups that enjoy special access to FB employees to get the answers they need. For now it doesn't seem to really be harming FB. They enjoy extreme growth and…
Fully agree. Documentation is incomplete and it really slow things much when trying to implement it seriously and not just in a demo page.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#4I've just been playing with the Facebook API for a toy project (submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1743486), and utterly agree - the documentation is not even barely adequate.
The other irritating thing is when you eventually discover that there's a bug, the best response you see is "Hi, sorry this is a known issue" with no resolution date or even rough idea of whether it'll be fixed in the next year or not.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#5I've just been playing with the Facebook API for a toy project (submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1743486 ), and utterly agree - the documentation is not even barely adequate. The other irritating thing is when you eventually discover that there's a bug, the best response you see is "Hi, sorry this is a known issue" with no resolution date or even rough idea of whether it'll be fixed in the next yea…
You can't count how many ways Facebook wrongs developers.
I had three more sections planned out, but said the heck with it, they've already taken so much of my time.
You are totally right, though.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#6If they can't provide the support we need with their limited resources (someone mentioned on Reddit they had only 6 people on their platform team), they should at least let us pay $250/yr for a "premium developer" account, and have that enable us access to a developer helpline or something.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#7This is so, so correct. I've been doing Facebook stuff for a few years now, and this rant is just the tip of the iceberg.
Other favorites:
* They accidentally flipped the switch to a new authentication mechanism overnight to a beta with no documentation. It took them over 48 hours to realize and fix this mistake.
* At one point I was asking for JSON and intermittently getting back XML instead. Apparently JSON parsers can't parse XML. Who knew?
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#8On the contrary. I think Facebook cares very much about developers. They do not want to give developers enough tools to create enduring products, because this would kill their walled garden, in a variety of ways.
The biggest way is they don't want to make it easy for you to get your data out of Facebook. Any robust, well-documented API would have to enable that.
In some ways this is even a good thing. A small number of compromised accounts can give access to most of the data on Facebook.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#9I'm more of a season fb dev, since I only play with the API from time to time, yet I've managed to suffer with their docs every time I try to do something.
Recently I've found another problem - public user data being visible to users, such as birthday, hometown and current location is not available through te Graph API as well as REST old one. Of course they're documented as available http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user and accessible by visitors, but not by API. I've found this case in lots of posts on the forums and bugtrack, f.ex. http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=8376 marks this bug as fixed, yet there's a new one http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=12090 with the same case.
While I need it mostly for side projects, I pity the ones whose FB app is core for their business, f.ex. this comment:
Do we have a fix for this solution? In spite of so many people facing the problem why is this issue not addressed till now?
Can someone answer these questions? Our application is totally based on the way Facebook gives the location info and most of the time we get the location info as NULL.
Re: The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers
#10FB seems to have a two tiered developer program. There are the peons, the guys forced to toil away trying to figure out how to make the stuff work by doing exactly what is described in the blog. And then there are the anointed: the big companies or YC-related startups that enjoy special access to FB employees to get the answers they need. For now it doesn't seem to really be harming FB. They enjoy extreme growth and…
> or YC-related startups
I don't think a startup would enjoy special access to FB technology just by being related to YC