Admittedly I did not make it through the whole article, but the comparison to iOS early on is laughable. The difference is A) access to a social graph of your friends and their trivial online activities vs B) a powerful touch screen computer in your pocket.
The Facebook API did not have some incredible mishandled potential. Instead, it was a very cool and forward-thinking API that had to constantly be modified to fight spam and keep up with Facebook's rapidly evolving product (which is a couple orders of magnitude more engaging now than it was in 2007 I might add).
Sure the Facebook API could have been better managed. Documentation and stability could have been better for sure. Maybe even the features could have been better. But the Facebook API is not a world changer. The Twitter API is more along the lines of a world changer, but they decided they needed to build the most profitable business possible and being plumbing was not in the cards. The Facebook API is a way to bolster the core Facebook product (which is amazing, probably the most engaging product ever created in human history short of addictive substances). This idea that if they just did right by developers it could have been so much more amazing is just a cyberpunk fantasy. The Facebook API could never be more than a reflection of a product.
Looking back on the mashup era, the future is not going to be from the goodwill of corporations to provide amazing APIs. Rather it will be open source, open protocols and open data that allow for true advancement in the state of the art.
The Facebook API did not have some incredible mishandled potential. Instead, it was a very cool and forward-thinking API that had to constantly be modified to fight spam and keep up with Facebook's rapidly evolving product (which is a couple orders of magnitude more engaging now than it was in 2007 I might add).
Sure the Facebook API could have been better managed. Documentation and stability could have been better for sure. Maybe even the features could have been better. But the Facebook API is not a world changer. The Twitter API is more along the lines of a world changer, but they decided they needed to build the most profitable business possible and being plumbing was not in the cards. The Facebook API is a way to bolster the core Facebook product (which is amazing, probably the most engaging product ever created in human history short of addictive substances). This idea that if they just did right by developers it could have been so much more amazing is just a cyberpunk fantasy. The Facebook API could never be more than a reflection of a product.
Looking back on the mashup era, the future is not going to be from the goodwill of corporations to provide amazing APIs. Rather it will be open source, open protocols and open data that allow for true advancement in the state of the art.