For what it's worth: I agree. I hate the StackExchange, and I want to get rid of it. But our support team is extremely serious about fixing it, cleaning it up, keeping it up-to-date, and using it as a platform from which we can distribute printed, old-school manuals. The idea here would be that appropriately tagged answers are automatically collated into a print manual; keeping the manual up-to-date would necessarily also ensure that the StackExchange is up-to-date and vice-versa. Think a QA-focused wiki, more than anything else.
They're working on this very hard right now, so I'm hoping that I have something concrete to point to, soon. If it works out, I think it might be a great direction for Facebook to go, too, both providing the social pressures necessary to keep lightly trod StackExchanges up-to-date, and providing a way for Facebook to possibly have organized, accurate documentation for the first time in forever.
Sorry I deleted my post before I saw your reply because it was ridiculously off-topic and I felt like it didn't really belong.. But to provide some context I essentially said that Stack Exchange was an unacceptable replacement for a manual in Fogbugz and Kiln.
Mainly that's because a lot of the right questions haven't been asked yet (I could probably provide a few of those instead of searching then quitting when I don't find what I need), or the information is out of date. It doesn't seem like there's a critical mass of users yet for it to be solid enough to replace the manual.
Also note I'm not saying I need a physical book in my hands. Just something indexed with a table of contents with most of the info I might go looking for.
I appreciate the responses here and on Twitter though, guys. Your support (excluding my qualms wrt documentation) really does seem top notch.
Whoa, are they replacing _all_ documentation with SO? I figured they meant that this was going to replace the severely less than helpful developer forums and FAQ pages.
Not for the Facebook API. I was talking about FogBugz and Kiln whose documentation was entirely replaced by Stack Exchange. Sorry for the confusion, I really took this thread far afield.
I would like to say that I've been generally happy with Stack Overflow as the official Q&A site for Android Developers. It seems to work pretty well for that purpose and I usually find what I need.
It would have been nice if Google would have taken the time to write detailed and correct documentation for Android, but unfortunately it is a rather incomplete and buggy mess right now. I've found myself hitting crashes and freezes that were a direct result of mismatches between the doc and the actual behavior of the code. One of these hits infrequently or only hit on some devices, which makes it insanely hard to debug. I filed a bug report, but apparently no-one at Google ever reads them, let alone triage them. I guess that's what they meant by being more like a startup?
Stack Overflow is nice as a community effort, but if a company wants developers to adopt their platform, proper documentation written by the people who know the code is essential. Hire some monkeys if you must, but leaving it up to the community to write their own docs is just plain lazy.
This is what I think reddit should do. There are endless arguments there over whether something belongs in /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/LI5 or /r/askscience, etc.
I always thought that a lot of what we call "subreddits" are actually orthogonal tags that apply to posts. Think about it, if there's a funny picture of a naked girl, why isn't that simultaneously in /r/pics, /r/funny, and /r/nsfw?
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] threadFor what it's worth: I agree. I hate the StackExchange, and I want to get rid of it. But our support team is extremely serious about fixing it, cleaning it up, keeping it up-to-date, and using it as a platform from which we can distribute printed, old-school manuals. The idea here would be that appropriately tagged answers are automatically collated into a print manual; keeping the manual up-to-date would necessarily also ensure that the StackExchange is up-to-date and vice-versa. Think a QA-focused wiki, more than anything else.
They're working on this very hard right now, so I'm hoping that I have something concrete to point to, soon. If it works out, I think it might be a great direction for Facebook to go, too, both providing the social pressures necessary to keep lightly trod StackExchanges up-to-date, and providing a way for Facebook to possibly have organized, accurate documentation for the first time in forever.
Mainly that's because a lot of the right questions haven't been asked yet (I could probably provide a few of those instead of searching then quitting when I don't find what I need), or the information is out of date. It doesn't seem like there's a critical mass of users yet for it to be solid enough to replace the manual.
Also note I'm not saying I need a physical book in my hands. Just something indexed with a table of contents with most of the info I might go looking for.
I appreciate the responses here and on Twitter though, guys. Your support (excluding my qualms wrt documentation) really does seem top notch.
See their blog post: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/545/
Their documentation remains independent, the alternative is insane.
(disclaimed: SE Inc. employee)
Stack Overflow is nice as a community effort, but if a company wants developers to adopt their platform, proper documentation written by the people who know the code is essential. Hire some monkeys if you must, but leaving it up to the community to write their own docs is just plain lazy.
I always thought that a lot of what we call "subreddits" are actually orthogonal tags that apply to posts. Think about it, if there's a funny picture of a naked girl, why isn't that simultaneously in /r/pics, /r/funny, and /r/nsfw?