2011 Application Platform Ratings
By Mike Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-12-27
Social Media, along with mobile apps, drove application development in 2011. 2012 appears to be on the same course. The biggest news in the social media arena came with Google's launch of Google+, followed closely by Facebook's announcements concerning the future of Open Graph. However, despite bearing the biggest news of the year, both companies fell short this year.
Although Facebook's new Open Graph allows developers to tap more deeply into the user experience of Facebook, the lack of conversation regarding the availability of these new features is frustrating. Only a handful of applications were actually able to deploy applications utilizing these new features, while the rest of us are stuck in beta purgatory. From a business perspective, how can we appropriately schedule resources and launch schedules when we have no idea when our apps utilizing these new features will deployable? Perhaps legal issues surrounding the Timeline feature have prevented them from full disclosure of the new features launch, but even a tentative date is something to schedule around. No date leaves developers in the dark and frustrated, which distracts from all the positive improvements Facebook has made in documentation, developer communication, code examples, and feature additions made throughout the year. Rating: C+
Like Facebook, Google can be considered a hacker company. Founded and engineered by hackers, Google has traditionally been very good about staying connected with the developer community via open sourcing various libraries and technologies. Providing stable tools with excellent documentation has typically been the status quo for Google products. It's uncertain who dropped the ball with Google+, but someone clearly dropped it - very hard - on all the would-be developer's feet. The + API is non-existent. The limited calls are hardly usable as a development platform. The documentation is really unclear as to what it does and doesn't do. Even with a limited API, Google should be setting out a clear boundary of what it can do compared to the other major social media platforms and what it plans to implement in the future. This frustrating lack of support has force the hand of various developers creating their own official APIs. Communication is abmissal, as a complete month separates the most recent blog posts on the developer blog. Extremely disappointing and surprising from a company that otherwise excels in this area. Rating: F
Despite the lack of big developer fanfare this year, Twitter has been chugging along. Releasing a new developer site increased usability for application management and made considerable improvements to an already acceptable documentation. The major changes in Twitter have come at the front end, and various smaller features have been added throughout the year. The only real complaint is that these new small features ("Recent Images", "Activity" feed, etc.) haven't been released with corresponding API calls. This complaint is only minor, however, as these functions can be created with combinations of existing API calls. Overall, Twitter has been steadily improving this year as a developer platform. Rating: A-
About the Author:
Mike Marr is a Staff Writer for WebProNews
|
