This is a great article by Seth Call on the many problems that plague the Facebook API. As someone who spends a lot of time working with the platform, I concur that it’s a bit of a mess. It’s definitely gotten better, but it is still a moving target of things breaking, not working, documentation being wrong, and just general confusion. I still maintain that I would gladly pay for a developer support option provided by Facebook.
Seth wrote:
Using the Facebook API is the one of the worst experiences as a developer I have ever had. This past week has been a real trial, and a true challenge to keep my energy and spirits up so that I remain efficient.
But perhaps one of the interesting points is a comment left by Carl Sjogreen:
This is Carl Sjogreen, I lead the PM team for the platform at Facebook. Just for some background, I recently joined Facebook after spending 2 years building on the Facebook platform, and suffering through many of the same frustrations as you. Its clear that we have some problems (many of which you’ve clearly laid out here), but its certainly not the case that we don’t care — in fact, revamping our documentation, cleaning up a confusing set of technologies that have been layered over time, and generally improving the quality, stability, and performance of the platform is a big focus for us over the coming months.
We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re listening, and will have some very concrete progress to show soon. If anyone has other specific feedback, you can email me at carlsjogreen@facebook.com
The whole thing is worth a read, and I can’t concur enough with what Seth wrote.