del.icio.us API and other not so successful trials

I am getting somewhat disappointed in some of these web 2.0 "things". Take, for example, the delicious API.

I wanted to download the posts by a number of ppl in my network to study what the hell are they doing. The API allows you to download all your posts in a neat xml format. That's cool, I thought, let me just do this to 20 of my buddies, and I can study better how teachers are bookmarking - especially how are they bookmarking websites that are not from their own countries or in their own languages (e.g. cross-border use).

The delicious API only allows you to get 30 latests posts from people that you do not know the password of. wtf? The same if you try to get them through RSS feeds, you only get 30. Then, there is the html code that you can use, but it also allows you to get only 100 posts. What about the rest, those 999 posts that I want? That stuff is so badly documented on the site that it's very annoying. Why not just be frank about it and say this is how things are?

I do not understand why to limit the API, RSS or html code when all that stuff is freely viewable anyway. So I tried using wget to suck that stuff out, but there is also something fishy and I can never get past 100 posts. So, I guess that just makes me to limit my study to a sample of 100 posts per user. Easy.

The other thing that I've been sightly disappointed with lately is APML and a number of tool that they make available for you to track your online profile, like engagd.com or tagurself.com.

You know what, the idea is great, but those tools/widgets suck, and they are so badly documented that it makes you just wanna cry. I've tried like 3 times in engagd to make my APML profile of 2 different feeds, and it never works. The tagurself cannot even load the example from the url that they have themselves posted as an example. wtf?

Moreover, the Yahoo! pipes are also somewhat strange, they never actually seem to post what they should. I put this example in one of my lasts post and it hardly never loads. Not so fun.

Hmm...I guess if more people used all these 2.0 tools, and not only talked about their potentially revolutionary usage by non savvy web-users, we could face the fact that the user-created web is far from being so revolutionary and does not empower users like me. Instead, I'd like to see those folks walk that talk, sit down on their asses and finally get past the BETA versions of their tools to actually make them work properly. Dude, cannot wait to get rid of all the BETA versions on the web.