Not to mention they often miss the most important thing to the developers: what the developers can do with the exposed API. The Google Plus API was super locked down, for example, you could only post actions from your app from some pre-approved list. That's very limiting. If a developer came up with something cool, like say trading cards, there likely wouldn't be a verb for them. Facebook was much better in that you could post anything, but had to go through app approval.
I don't think the article's methods would be very good re fixing this since when they asked developers to accomplish goals with the API and tracked them, they already decided what would be written.
Maybe it was just my friend group, but I feel like Facebook had a nice period shortly after it switched from profiles to walls, but people actually thought about what they were posting instead of spamming it constantly. Then between the spam from inane facebook games (via the API access you mentioned, I think I have ~100 of these blocked still because of how they gobbled up the whole feed at the time) and now the giant number of content farms, the news feed is attention grabbing yet useless for anything actually social.
Someone please steal this idea:
- Social network where you get 1 post per day. Text status, link, photo, whatever.
- You have a couple of free "bonus posts" each month for when you really want a second post.
- Monetize by selling additional posts, but the cost ramps up exponentially.
I'm sure it's not destined for facebook-level gajillions of dollars, but there's got to be some market for a sane social network that you can actually keep up with, right? Instagram is working for me right now, but maybe only because I don't know that many people on it. I've tried FB and twitter and basically checked out of both.
I don't think the article's methods would be very good re fixing this since when they asked developers to accomplish goals with the API and tracked them, they already decided what would be written.