[sdizdar]

With all due respect to Facebook and many great engineers at Facebook, if you look at quality of Facebook API ( documentation, bugs, reliability, compatibility), I don't think they followed "hiring the best" in the division working on Facebook API.

[dasil003]

I disagree. The fact is that Facebook does not optimize for documentation, reliability or compatibility. The reason is because their goal is to be as agile as possible, and iterate extremely quickly. It's true that this makes life terrible for developers, but that's not a problem because Facebook does not have a shortage of developers. Over the past 3.5 years the Facebook platform has evolved so quickly that a lot of bugs simply disappeared by deprecation; if they had spent more time on solid architecture they would have left a lot on the table business-wise.

Also, I'm not sure if you used the Facebook API when it was new, but I remember in 2007 being distinctly blown away by how functional it was and how far ahead of the curve they were on web APIs. You can argue that "the best" engineers wouldn't churn out something so ephemeral, but that's subjective.