[thestranger]

As the article mentions, a lot of the rankings seem to be influenced by the popularity of the service. Twitter and Facebook are going to have more complaints simply due to the fact that more people use them.

Twitter in particular has a very good API, I have never used Digg's, LinkedIn's, or Paypal's, but I doubt very much they are better documented and easier to use than Twitter's. (I have had some problems with Facebook's API, so perhaps it is deserving of its title.)

A better way to run this survey would be to only allow people who have actually used all the API's to vote. It would be difficult in my opinion to vote for an API as the worst with no basis of comparison.

[georgemcbay]

Twitter's API has historically been very good. I think at least part of the issue with Twitter and developer satisfaction is that they have spent the last year doing just about everything they could to push developers off of making full featured Twitter apps using that API short of outright banning them from doing it.

Seems to me that the problem is more an issue of the process and politics of using the API (and widespread uncertainty as to how long the full API will be available given Twitter's signaled future plans) rather than technical/documentation problems with the API itself.

[naz]

Agreed. The eBay API is an abomination, but so few people are brave enough to use it that it would never show up in a Worst API survey.

[yesimahuman]

Exactly. LinkedIn doesn't really have much of an API in terms of the data you can get out of it. Facebook does, and I assume far more people use it because of that.