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October 13, 2010

I’m done building Facebook apps for clients | Ryan Waggoner

...April 2010, Facebook decided to completely revamp the platform and roll out a series of new APIs...and apparently hired the worst technical documentation guy they could find to write the docs. They’re incomplete, inaccurate, and contain very little sample code, context, and otherwise useful info...

I started building Facebook apps about three years ago, when I first started doing web development consulting full-time. My first apps were simple affairs, but over time they grew more complex and I leveraged the platform features more and more.

Over the last three years, I’ve spent an increasing amount of time on the Facebook platform. This year I built applications for Neutrogena and IHOP, both moderately complex, and I also spent a decent chunk of time this year working on several social games on Facebook. Working on Facebook has always been an exercise in frustration, because they’re constantly changing and breaking the platform. The documentation was also always a little lacking, but it was setup as a wiki, and developers added to it over time and made it at least somewhat useful.

... And the new APIs don’t even work half the time; there are bugs in the tracker that have been there for months, interrupting core functionality. The only place to really find any kind of useful info is the forums, which means hours of searching to find even basic info. Often this info is posted by people at Facebook, but they never bother to put it in the official documentation. I’ve worked with APIs from 2-man startups that offered a better experience, so it’s especially sad to have to deal with this from a platform with 500 million people on it.

Now, if you’re building your own apps and you’re making money, I’m sure these annoyances might be worth putting up with. But when you’re building for clients, it’s just a source of stress. Clients don’t care that it was Facebook (not you) who broke the feature that was working yesterday, and they don’t care that what you said you could do two months ago can no longer be done because Facebook decided to change the platform (again). They blame you for all of it.

So I’m done. The money is good and there’s a lot of work, but the stress and frustration just isn’t worth it. Until Facebook decides to implement some controls to stabilize the development of the platform and write some documentation that’s actually semi-useful, I’ll work somewhere else.

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79 Responses to “I’m done building Facebook apps for clients”

  1. Chris Blown says:

    Great to read this post, exactly our sentiments as well.

    Its really hard to set clients expectations when you yourself have no idea how Facebook are going to implement their next round of changes. Take for example the move from FBML to iFrames. Their roadmap makes a recommendation for you to start using iFrames and says that they’ll be available within Page Tabs within a few months. But no explanation of how they are going implement this in relation to the “click to interact” process FBML page tabs currently have. Maybe they aren’t sure how this will work yet, but they could at least explain their intentions. Are they doing away with this “click process”? Will iFrame page tabs auto load? Are new iFrame page tabs going to require a landing page click thru? If so what content can we provide as a lead in (FBML or just an image)? Forum post on this here http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.ph...

    The irony is that while Facebook is a great tool for engaging in social communication, Facebook devs seem to be hiding within their Facebook fortress not saying a word.

    We’d like to meet you guys, lets see some development blog posts, what challenges you’re facing? We might even be able to offer some help…

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Facebook API: Everything you wanted to know about the most invasive API on the Planet, but didn't know it was happening...to ask! via programmableweb

FacebookTrack this API

The Facebook API is a platform for building applications that are available to the members of the social network of Facebook. The API allows applications to use the social connections and profile information to make applications more involving, and to publish activities to the news feed and profile pages of Facebook, subject to individual users privacy settings. With the API, users can add social context to their applications by utilizing profile, friend, Page, group, photo, and event data. The API uses RESTful protocol and responses are localized and in XML format.

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