Sometime last fall, Facebook blew away their entire developer wiki. A month or two afterwards was my first experience seriously engaging their platform since early 2008, and many of the tutorials and search results out there on the web still pointed to the smoking remains of the wiki -- which hadn't actually been 404'd, they just lead to Bing searches roughly topically related to what had been there before.
As best I could discover, the rationale was apparently concern over two sets of docs -- their own official docs and a community maintained one.
It's less clear what made them decide a half-assed official effort would be a better plan than combining whatever clearly limited internal resources they were throwing at the problem with a world of developers that is, despite persistent stories of abuse, apparently still interested in working with them.
If nothing else, curating and augmenting a community-led effort would have radiated a considerably smaller degree of contempt for the effort already put into it.
I kindof suspected at the time that decision tells you most of what you need to know about how much FB cares about the experience developers are generally having with their platform, and I have to say, I haven't seen much to convince me otherwise.
Which is not just incompetent and unprofessional, but obviously very bad for business.
Does anybody doubt at this point that Facebook is crumbling under its own weight? For all their money and hiring they still have a stagnant application and a trainwreck of a developer platform. Predictable I suppose when you grow too much, too fast. Well, hope they enjoy the ride until the next market disruption at which point, tell MySpace I said hello.
The JavaScript SDK is a complete mess. They broke BC when they introduced OAuth2 support.
Their code speaks volumes to the choices they've made as an organization, as well as their technical skills. Let's face it, Facebook is not a software company like Google, MS or even Apple. I know some Facebook Engineers and all of them are average PHP developers.
Like I said, code tells a story, and in this case, unfortunately, it's not a good one.
As best I could discover, the rationale was apparently concern over two sets of docs -- their own official docs and a community maintained one.
It's less clear what made them decide a half-assed official effort would be a better plan than combining whatever clearly limited internal resources they were throwing at the problem with a world of developers that is, despite persistent stories of abuse, apparently still interested in working with them.
If nothing else, curating and augmenting a community-led effort would have radiated a considerably smaller degree of contempt for the effort already put into it.
I kindof suspected at the time that decision tells you most of what you need to know about how much FB cares about the experience developers are generally having with their platform, and I have to say, I haven't seen much to convince me otherwise.