Comments on: Facebook Development Sucks

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:01:23 +0000

Guess what, here more than a year later, I’m trying to make a facebook app, and the examples they have in their documentation simply doesn’t work. I have to replace paramater names to accomodate their new ones, and the values they say are the default, are no longer the default.

The documentation is poorly written, and not updated.

By: Kris Hollenbeck

Kris Hollenbeck — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:10:58 +0000

Couldn’t agree more. Not only does the documentation suck, but it seems that bugs never get resolved. And by the time they do get resolved Facebook decides to change everything.

By: Bush Mackel

Bush Mackel — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:30:02 +0000

@Chris @Deepak – The best thing that has happened to me since writing this post is that I have done ZERO Facebook development. Here’s hoping I never have to again!

By: Deepak

Deepak — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 01:31:46 +0000

http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2010/05/facebook-you-are-doing-it-wrong/

its sucks big time

By: Chris Wade

Chris Wade — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:40:47 +0000

I’ve been working on my first facebook app for a little over three weeks. Right now, the state of the documentation is still pretty bad: although they’ve made some efforts to clean it up, the transition from the old API to the new one has left tire tracks on the web.

First, they’ve removed wiki.developers.facebook.com. All links to the wiki are now rewritten as a search request to the new documentation. When I google a question about how to do something in facebook, most of the results that come up have a link to the wiki. The results that come up often end up being circular – I click one of them and end up at the same place in the documentation where I started – unable to find the solution to my problem, which was why I was using google in the first place.

Second, there are still very few usable real-world examples. At every step along the way, the documentation seems to assume prior knowledge of the API that I don’t have. Every API call in the documentation needs to have a functioning code sample that I can just copy and paste and examine how it works. I’ve gone back and re-read the docs several times, but a lot of what I know about it now has come from other sources on the web.

Third, of the examples that are there, a lot of them simply don’t work. With the curl examples, I get errors that aren’t documented. When I finally figure out how to send the requests without errors, I simply get no results.

I could go on. This seems to be symptomatic of all levels of FB documentation.

By: Rosandra Cuello

Rosandra Cuello — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:25:15 +0000

I realize it’s been a few month since this post but this is happening to me right now. I have to write a facebook app for my work and I’m struggling to find up to date tutorials since all of them appear to be based on elements that fb is phasing out.

By: Bush Mackel

Bush Mackel — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:30:22 +0000

@Akexys – Could the process be anymore frustrating? I might kill myself if I ever have write another FB app I swear.

By: Alexys

Alexys — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:47:54 +0000

Don’t forget about the lack of FB developers’ support on their own forum. They seem nonexistent. I hope some real competition comes along soon so maybe they might actually be more proactive supporting their own stupid application. (If I didn’t have clients asking for FB pages I wouldn’t touch the site at all).

By: Bush Mackel

Bush Mackel — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:27:26 +0000

@mives – “hate hate” is right.
@Lance – Couldn’t agree more. And you know since writing this post I have done ZERO Facebook development. Hallelujah.

By: Lance

Lance — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:33:21 +0000

Hear hear. I think you went nice on them too. All the links on their own site point to outdated documentation, and there are either no coding examples or no screenshots (or other) of the sample code they do provide. It really is amazing that with all the development going on there that the documentation (and available tutorials/examples) aren’t a lot better.