Twitter and Google both have excellent APIs. Twitter's API is helped a great deal by every client built by Twitter is also built on the Twitter API.
Google's APIs, in my experience, have great documentation and an excellent learning curve. Want to do something simple? Well here's code that does that. Want to do a medium challenge? Use that code and this documentation to expand it - often projects can gain sophistication quickly with only tweaks here and there.
There's no doubt the Facebook API is terrible. You have to read several pages of text and answer a bunch of obtuse questions just to get your app registered. Then you have to deal with the oft mentioned documentation problems. The biggest problem I see is that its so hard to develop for, no one has built any decent third party libraries - as opposed to Twitter which has a ton of excellent libraries for interfacing with your favorite language.
I can't help but wonder if all of this is done on purpose. It seems to me that Facebook doesn't want anyone to be able to make as much money as them developing on their network, so they make it impossible. If there was a better API, there might be 10 Zyngas by now.
Google's APIs, in my experience, have great documentation and an excellent learning curve. Want to do something simple? Well here's code that does that. Want to do a medium challenge? Use that code and this documentation to expand it - often projects can gain sophistication quickly with only tweaks here and there.
There's no doubt the Facebook API is terrible. You have to read several pages of text and answer a bunch of obtuse questions just to get your app registered. Then you have to deal with the oft mentioned documentation problems. The biggest problem I see is that its so hard to develop for, no one has built any decent third party libraries - as opposed to Twitter which has a ton of excellent libraries for interfacing with your favorite language.
I can't help but wonder if all of this is done on purpose. It seems to me that Facebook doesn't want anyone to be able to make as much money as them developing on their network, so they make it impossible. If there was a better API, there might be 10 Zyngas by now.