With its burgeoning user base, social media network Facebook has been in the forefront of the social media scene. Now, it finds itself the recipient of the redoubtable recognition of being in the number one spot on the list of Worst Application Programming Interfaces (APIs )in a survey conducted by photo aggregation service Trove. The survey of over 100 developers was aimed to determine which external APIs were the most difficult to integrate into developer’s projects.
The second and third positions were occupied by Google APIs and Twitter APIs, respectively.
The results are not surprising considering the fact that Facebook, Google and Twitter are the most popular services among developers today. It was obvious that they would feature higher up than APIs of other sites such as Digg which are not wildly popular now.
On the survey results, Trove said that there were a large number of complaints about current API providers and they believe that developers deserve better. Trove commented, “They are not serving their developers well. There’s bad documentation. There are problems with services like OAuth. APIs randomly change without warning. And there is nothing resembling industry standards, just best practices which everyone finds a way around. As developers we build our livelihoods on these APIs and we deserve better.”
ProgrammableWeb blog posted, The survey had multiple choice questions which were aimed at generic issues, and long-form answers which asked for more detail. This is where developers complained about specific companies.
One developer wrote in his long-form answer, “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. They release half-baked stuff that doesn’t work, shut down existing functionality without replacing it and never document anything correctly.”
Poor documentation and changes to the API were the most common issues across all companies, though Facebook took the brunt of the attack. A developer complained, “Facebook continually alters stuff, thus rapidly outdating my apps.” A more succinct answer was, “Facebook. Everything is broken.”
Complaints about Google were spread across several services. Most of the complaints were about the API not being available or being shut down.
Though Twitter had a few negative complaints, it also received an equal number of positive comments than any other service. One developer wrote, “The Twitter documentation is top notch.”
Other results from the survey dealt with integrations, overhead and details regarding specific problem areas. Belying Trove’s belief, developers did not find that the maintenance for service integrations worsened with the passing years.
The most common problems were listed as follows:
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Poor documentation
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OAuth
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Poor error handling
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Lack of example code
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Lack of test environments
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Lack of standardized libraries across languages
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APIs that change/break frequently (mostly Facebook)
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Normalizing data to match internal data structures
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Line between use and abuse
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Arbitrary throttling (differences between services)
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Differing standards (REST v SOAP v XML-RPC, XML v JSON v POST, versioning v not, etc.)
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Getting services to talk to a dev machine behind a firewall
Trove said it will post a new survey soon, in order to ask some of the questions which developers told them they would like to see next time.