On the one hand Google Plus just started not too long ago so when you compare it to other services that took a decade or two to come to life it is good to keep in mind that expansion will happen as the product matures…
With that said one of the developers of the plus feature took time to write a HUGE post about not only Plus but the Industry in total. The whole rant seems to be targeted at Amazon… I guess former employers stick in your head for the rest of your life no matter how far you move and how nice a place you are in now.
Like I said a good 70% of the post was about Amazon’s API offerings and the AWS system.. Honestly I kinda don’t like the AWS offerings that much because Amazon does not help developers and even recently they have been subjecting their oldest class of developers the Merchant Services / Affiliate Network with a lot of BS on Throttling the API access while giving away tons of cloud space and process time to anyone who buys a MP3 or just wants to store some crap on their servers.
With that said Yegge does have some good points in his post that all companies should consider.
When you develop your service it is the exposure of that service to third parties that expands your business exponentially.
He described this when talking about Facebook and how their third party developer access makes the Facebook experience completely different for all of their customers.
Then he talked about Microsoft’s MSDN – Developer Network .. I would have to agree that MSDN is probably the best set of documentation about any software available. You can go to MSDN and pull out the API documentation and find exactly what you want to do and then along with that someone posts some sample code to let you realize exactly how to implement the calls. You could be a non-trained but enthusiastic computer user and visit MSDN and learn how to build an app and use some of their code to shorten the time of development…
This is where Amazon SUCKS.. it is also where Google and every other company that exposes an API for third parties SUCKS…
I mean quite honestly when I started working with Twitters oAuth I had never touched it before and although I understand parts of how to implement it Twitter FAILED to even put up a basic PHP script to help the thousands of developers that were now expected to rewrite their apps overnight or take shit from their customers…. they hardly even gave any lead time or testing on the oAuth changes…
And Amazon is exactly the same they give no documentation and if they do give lead time its only after people bitch so much that it would be as if the whole service went offline for 6 months… so they lead it a bit.. BUT they give no docs or sample code… OR the fucking assholes give sample code in Python or ADA or Assembly or some crap.. while 99.9995% of their users are writing in Perl or PHP…
When you have to search the web and not the providers site for API and Code Samples then that is the FAIL…
And most if not all companies do this… they ALL SUCK…
And Yegge’s final point was that the Rollout was immature because there was no forethought.. well
Google has released a lot of resources so if Plus was a fail its because the leaders didn’t understand what they needed to do and this is probably because they are people that work inside of companies that offer these API and Resource Services and they have never been one of the Outside people that have to pull 3 weeks of 20 hour days to meet a deadline because a Service provider changed their API and they have to guess the best practice to interface with it rather then read documentation and apply sample code.
You can read Steve Yegge’s post here
https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX
