Facebook wins "Worst API Developer review

Review of more than 100 developers previously posted here on hacker news, in order to determine what external APIs have been the most difficult to integrate into the project developers. Winner ... or rather loser? Facebook. Refer to the Facebook API developers in the expression after errors, poor documentation, endless API changes, slow response times and other headaches.

Google APIs were in second place, and APIs of Twitter came in third.

Image source: Programmable Web

Of course these three services are the most popular among today's developers, so it's not surprising to hear that they are at the top of the list for the problem. Of course Facebook, Google and Twitter will come in higher than, say, Digg API, which is hardly ever seen in the wild these days.

However, Facebook, which received the most complaints from developers, calling it "broken", bugs and poor offering documentation. Twitter received complaints too, but it is also the most positive comments over any other service. Meanwhile, complaints about Google has APIs that have been closed or are missing.

According to photo aggregation service treasure, which was held in the survey, there were a large number of complaints about the current vendor API. And treasure thinks that developers deserve better:

They no longer serve their developers as well. No bad documentation. There are problems with services like OAuth. APIs arbitrarily changed without warning. And there's nothing even resembling industry standards, just best practices that one finds a way to get around. As developers, we build our livelihood on these APIs, and we deserve better.

Additional data

Other interesting survey results had to do with associations, overhead and detailed information about specific headaches.

For example, almost two thirds of the developers claimed they had 3 or more integration services, and a third said they used between 4 and 6. 9 developers reported that they used 11 or more services.

Surprisingly the developers did not consider that the integration services received year after year, worse that treasure believed would be the case. This may be related to the improvement over time as standardized and commiditized libraries, or perhaps the reviewer admitted bad language in their survey question.

With regard to the headaches? There were quite a few listed, including:

Poor documentationOAuthPoor error handlingLack example codeLack environmentsLack test standard libraries throughout the languagesAPIs that changes/break often (mainly Facebook) normalize data for mapping of internal data structuresLine between using and abuseArbitrary, Regulation (differences between services) Differing standards (rest v v SOAP XML-RPC, XML v JSON (v) post, versioning, v, etc.)For services to talk to the dev machine for firewallTrove said that he will post a new survey in the near future, to ask some of the issues that developers told them that they would like to see next time.

Additional sources: Programmable Web

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Social game developer Kixeye raises $ 18 million, adds Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader to its Board

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Back in April, a developer of games, casual collective rebranded as Kixeye and launched a new real-time strategy game, titled battle pirates. Since launch, it was hard work at improving some of the new capital to expand his team and implement additional headers. Officially it happened to pass this morning as the company announced that it has closed $ 18 million Series c round of financing, bringing the total investment to $ 23.5 million.

The new round led by Jafco Ventures, were from returning investors Trinity Ventures and enterprise partners. The increase, Jafco managing partner Joe Horowitz is the signing of the Council of its launch and will be merged into — big symbolic feather in the CAP for Kixeye — Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader, aka "a. t."

According to Kixeye CEO will Harbin run hit his achievement over the past 8 months, which has become profitable and positive cash flow. So when you add a trader's Board of Directors, Kixeye hopes to use Zynga's Executive Vice President of sales and business development experience (especially in the scale Zynga in the largest player in the social gaming) to help continue its recent growth.

With regard to the trader, he said that he saw Kixeye emerge as one of the leading innovators in social gaming space, especially for hardcore gamers. "Gamers want a big game, not re-skinned versions of the same," said a. t. "I am pleased to be part of this company and I look forward to helping them continue their successful trajectory." And speaking of skins and cloning, both things that Kixeye became extremely conscious, given that the launch last week accused funded competitor Kabam, copying its successful backyard monsters and skins for the beta launch Kabam in the Edgeworld.

As Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, while charges skins have become commonplace in the rapidly growing (and competitive) social games space but Kixeye thought that "especially egregious" in this instance. "This is not only offensive to us," Harbin told VentureBeat. "It's very bad for this space. We are fighting an uphill battle to create hardcore games on Facebook. More clones for these games, the more they can sour cream consumers in the market ".

And that more charges of stealing (and hides), also known as Zynga (and hence, a.t.), who was accused of stealing source code for Farmville, for example.

Thus players social gaming, everyone is looking for ways to distinguish their brands and their names from the competition. In the case of Kixeye, Harbin said that the company plans to use some of its new funding to start a new, aggressive release cycle, which will include some new approaches to social games.

"Next year we will be releasing one major title for the quarter, since our future war Commander RTAS," said the Director. "We're also going to create games for Facebook, which nobody had seen before, including dynamic MMORPG, racing game and, hopefully, titles that really push the envelope". And Harbin has every reason to want to take these genres in Facebook, as racing, action, and the hidden objects are genres that have multiple names on Facebook at the moment.

And the company is growing at a rate that justifies his new quest: over the past 18 months, Kixeye has grown its group from 3 to 60, and passed with little presence on Facebook to more than 5 million monthly active users. Part of the reason that Kixeye was so firmly defending backyard monsters is that the game was really what put Kixeye on the map, as it is currently averaging more than 1 million active users per day.

So as a developer of games of San Francisco goes ahead with a WAD of cash in his pocket, you can probably expect run continue to focus on creating a Facebook titles for the hardcore gamer, trying to make a more interesting and challenging games, older and more mature audience. And I would expect that occurs after the top engineering talent will be part of these efforts.

More information on Kixeye check 'em out at home here.

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