Not to mention they often miss the most important thing to the developers: what the developers can do with the exposed API. The Google Plus API was super locked down, for example, you could only post actions from your app from some pre-approved list. That's very limiting. If a developer came up with something cool, like say trading cards, there likely wouldn't be a verb for them. Facebook was much better in that you could post anything, but had to go through app approval.

I don't think the article's methods would be very good re fixing this since when they asked developers to accomplish goals with the API and tracked them, they already decided what would be written.