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Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

developers.facebook.com

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Re: Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

#3

Post by pkteison »

I don't see the stack overflow model as being a great fit for what facebook api developers need. The main problem I saw with facebook api was that the right way to do things kept changing, and the docs and forum didn't keep up well. You basically needed to begin facebook API work by reading the entire blog in chronological order and then keep on scanning the dev blog daily, which may work ok if you're a fulltime facebook API developer but it is not a good fit for contract or part-time or hobby development.

I think changing APIs is begging for a wiki much more than a Q&A site. Facebook used to have a wiki for their api, but they went and deleted it, which I considered basically unforgiveable and proceeded to do my best to avoid having to touch the API after that.

In short, bringing back http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ and focusing on keeping it current would be a much better start than a Q&A site, even a really good Q&A site. You'd still have the need-to-keep-with-changes problem, but at least you'd have somewhere to start from, and wouldn't keep getting referred to out of date information when googling answers.

Yes I know Stack Overflow has community editable wiki question styles, but then you just compound the problem and now need to update 100 different 'how do I [x]' questions every time the API changes.

Re: Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

#4

Post by reemrevnivek »

See also the blog.stackoverflow.com side of the partnership here:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/facebook-stackoverflow...

Basically, it's a siloed version of stackoverflow.com containing only the tags relevant to Facebook. They're thinking about creating mini-sites for other major subdomains (see also http://meta.webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/913/is-this-...).

Re: Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

#5

Post by jgh »

pkteison wrote: post #3

I don't see the stack overflow model as being a great fit for what facebook api developers need. The main problem I saw with facebook api was that the right way to do things kept changing, and the docs and forum didn't keep up well. You basically needed to begin facebook API work by reading the entire blog in chronological order and then keep on scanning the dev blog daily, which may work ok if you're a fulltime face…

Yeah but that takes work, why would they want to do that when they could just let the community-based Q&A site take care of it?

Re: Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

#6

Post by DrCatbox »

paulnelligan wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I like the way that my personal and professional life are suddenly becoming intertwined ... I want a few online identities dammit, not one!

Im sure I dont want that.

Does this mean stackoverflow will share their user data with facebook? If so, thats a disaster.

Re: Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

#8

Post by darklajid »

reemrevnivek wrote: post #4

See also the blog.stackoverflow.com side of the partnership here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/facebook-stackoverflow... Basically, it's a siloed version of stackoverflow.com containing only the tags relevant to Facebook. They're thinking about creating mini-sites for other major subdomains (see also http://meta.webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/913/is-this-... ).

Hate the idea. SO's search is decent. This is just the kind of fragmentation that I already don't like about programmers., unix. etc.. You can easily filter your lists by tags, you can easily search by tag.

Where's the benefit?

Re: Facebook Partners with Stack Overflow

#10

Post by JeremyBanks »

paulnelligan wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I like the way that my personal and professional life are suddenly becoming intertwined ... I want a few online identities dammit, not one!

Did you RTFA?

This is just providing a view of Stack Overflow that's limited to Facebook questions, and Facebook staff providing more support there. Facebook has been a login option for Stack Overflow for a long time, but don't even require you to even make an account to ask questions.

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