Social Media APIs

While my job is lots of fun, it's really annoying that nobody (facebook, twitter, gowalla, yelp, etc) ever lets the world of developers know that they changed their API or what they changed.

How do you find the changes? Your product stops working!

So, for all of you developers out there wondering why your Yelp app is crashing, here's why.

• Retrieving Business reviews using http://www.yelp.com/syndicate/biz/{0}/rss.xml, where {0} is the business id, is no longer available from Yelp.
• The Yelp API is still valid for retrieving information about a business on Yelp. For example, http://api.yelp.com/phone_search?phone={0}&wysid={1}, where {0} is the businesses phone number and {1} is your API key.
• Sadly, the API only returns the three most recent reviews.

Pretty sucky to only be able to get the last three reviews, but if your app has suddenly stopped functioning you now know why and how to fix it.