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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

The Facebook API is, by far, the worst API I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. I'm not sure whose API would be second, but it would be a very distant second. They don't follow any kind of versioning, randomly remove or break existing features, don't respond to bug reports, and have absolutely horrid documentation.

If working at Facebook on the Facebook.com codebase is anything like working with their API, it's a wonder anyone would want to work there.

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If the FB API is your worst then consider yourself lucky. At least when the FB API has breaking changes they're usually a simple fix. Try working with a poorly documented SOAP API with a giant WSDL or a financial service's custom API that doesn't follow any conventions. There are far worse out there.

Except when they aren't.

Last major one that bit me was some functionality just stopped working - when you made requests to the URI they provided (that had worked before) in the docs, doing exactly what they said, you get an error.

Now you're thinking, the error will help you solve it.

What do you do when their documentation tells you to use a URI, and you get a 404 error? I don't mean once for a short time. I mean, one day it just stops working and gives 404 errors, for weeks and weeks. Open tickets, with no response from support.

A lot of large corporations are like this. It seems that the larger an organization gets, the worse their API docs get. For example, look at the QuickBooks API by Intuit, or FedEx's Web Services API.

Years have gone by and the mention of "Fedex" and "API" in the same sentence still makes me cringe. What a horrible, horrible experience...

Same problem for me. I put up a small web app that used their API. The only thing it did on my side was grab the Facebook user ID of the person. It broke, then broke again, and then again. Eventually I gave up and ripped the Facebook component of the app out and had people go straight to my web page.

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