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Comment by lrm242 | Hacker News Reader

FB seems to have a two tiered developer program. There are the peons, the guys forced to toil away trying to figure out how to make the stuff work by doing exactly what is described in the blog. And then there are the anointed: the big companies or YC-related startups that enjoy special access to FB employees to get the answers they need.

For now it doesn't seem to really be harming FB. They enjoy extreme growth and developers are pulled to their platform because of their enormous gravity. Over time, however, it is really not sustainable. If they want to be a platform they should start acting like a platform and that means making sure their APIs are documented properly and developers have a way to seek out information they need. Microsoft, whether you like them or not, does a great job of this.

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You're overstating this quite a bit. I work for a startup that was an early launch partner for Pages back in mid 2007, and have built and maintained our Facebook application from that time. We have numerous contacts inside Facebook, and they can be of help occasionally, but they can just as easily turn around and screw us. They stole hundreds of extremely popular pages from us that we built up over years, and they did it basically on the same freakin day that our CEO was having high level meetings on unrelated partnership deals with Facebook brass.

The reason is very closely tied to Facebook's engineering success: there is no top-down control over anything. All the engineers are encouraged to break things and to keep the pace of progress rapid. For developers on their API this is a nightmare scenario. However your claim that this is not sustainable may just be wishful thinking. Facebook craps all over its developers, but it's not clear at all that that price is too high to pay for the continued agility that Facebook exhibits. It's hard to argue with that kind of market dominance. Plus, Facebook is so nimble that if API stability does become a problem they can easily switch gears and focus on it.

In other words, I wouldn't hold your breath for any change at Facebook.

API stability is a problem.

An engineering culture that breaks APIs is bullshit. Taking 48+ hours to fix show-stopper platform errors is bullshit. Their 'innovative approach' is not working and the proof is in the pudding. They have not reached 500 million users solely on the success of this engineering approach, and I would vehemently argue they have reached 500 million users in spite of it.

The price will become too high to pay, if the future they envision involves third party developers at all. 500 million users is a hell of a lot of momentum, but it won't carry them as far as they want to go.

Of course it's a problem. It's a terribly onerous problem for developers. But the thing is that they don't have any problem getting developers to deal with it because there's really no alternative. And businesses hiring web developers are demanding Facebook integration as much as ever. Sure, if they fixed the problems then developers might be more enthusiastic, but you haven't shown that that will improve Facebook's bottom line. They have no shortage of apps, users, or growth, so the onus is on you to support your argument.

Saying that you think they have reached 500 million users inspite of their engineering approach is far from a common-sense argument. It's clear that Facebook ran technical circles around MySpace. And it's clear that they have launched new features at a breakneck pace throughout their history that have fueled growth at every turn.

I personally will avoid working with Facebook as much as I can, but will that hurt them? Not in the current business climate.

Sadly, this is not the case. I am currently working for a large media company that had/has relatively close ties with members of the FB dev team. The position I hold now was previously occupied by a fellow who went to work for FB and was a key interface with them over the last year and a half for things like FB Connect. I can tell you now that we got no privileged documentation that anyone else didn't. The only thing we really got was a poor guy who heard our complaints a little too often and wasn't really able to do much to help out.

The company I work for has email and phone access to a Facebook developer for questions, but we are part of a beta program.

When I browsed the API on my own it was an utter disaster on par with the article's description.

We are probably in a similar program, but our developer contact was basically of no use whatsoever. Probably not his fault - it seems to be a cultural thing as observed above.

Even after last week's developer meeting and subsequent rollout of changes, my request for documentation was met with - not paraphrasing - "We'll get back to you."

Fully agree. Documentation is incomplete and it really slow things much when trying to implement it seriously and not just in a demo page.

> or YC-related startups

I don't think a startup would enjoy special access to FB technology just by being related to YC

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/405

We’ll provide product, technical and design resources to support new Y Combinator companies interested in working with us to build deeply social products, whether a website or an application on Facebook.com. These companies will have priority access to our technologies and programs such as Facebook Credits, Instant Personalization and upcoming beta features.

OK. Obviously, I haven't paid the needed attention.

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