Facebook has a new partner and its the programming Q&A website, Stack Overflow. This partnership would launch facebook.stackoverflow.com, so that the growth in the number of Facebook Platform developers can be supported. Facebook even announced that in September, it would phase out its long prevailing Developer forum. This old Developer forum would become mere read-only forum from 1st September.
If one makes a visit to the prevailing Developer forum, they would see a banner which is placed which says that developers are encouraged to post their newly popped up questions on Stack Overflow. This banner has been placed at the top of the Forum.
Talking about the improvements in the old forum, Facebook said that it has sweated out many months working on to improve the forum, but finally they settled with Stack Overflow. So, now the Facebook Developer Site’s ‘Q & A’ link would have a redirection to facebook.stackoverflow.com.
The choice to opt for partnering Stack Overflow might be as it noticed that it was already a hub for developers who were helped out with their technical queries. This step merely makes Stack Overflow a full time query partner for Facebook developers. This has even changed Stack Overflow’s subdomain as it now has Facebook tag filter where one can view the Facebook related questions . This would make it easier for those Facebook developers who already participate actively on Stack Overflow.
The integration is easy as one can login with their Facebook account to ask and answer question. If one has a Stack Overflow account, then they even have this option for login. The new members of this question and answer site can even participate like any other member, which would help them gain points, resulting in better reputation for themselves in the community. However if one answers questions which are specific for Facebook, they would be given general Stack Overflow reputation, but the user ranking pages for the link would show that the earned reputation is only for those questions which were Facebook-tagged.
Facebook has planned to take the partnership to a higher level by adding to its documentation, some of the important and relevant questions answered on Stack Overflow related to Facebook. Each API method doc would have a dedicated section at the bottom which would have five top-rated questions displayed. The sorting out of these questions would be on the basis of votes it gets. The development here would be seen in the weeks to come.
A Stack Overflow spokesperson stated that their greatest asset is the community members and their knowledge collectively with the desire to help. He continued saying that there would now be a feeling better than being recognized which has motivated them to help others. He said that when Facebook offered being a partner to their developer site, they were all ears.
Two weeks back, a developer survey had found that the API of the social networking giant was the worst of the lot and few of the queries included Poor documentation, Poor error handling, Lack of example code, APIs that change/break frequently, Arbitrary throttling (differences between services), Differing standards (REST v SOAP v XML-RPC, XML v JSON v POST, versioning v not, etc.) and Getting services to talk to a dev machine behind a firewall.
This might even had a point to play for Facebook’s redirecting its developer forum to Stack Overflow.