Google Announces APIs Scheduled for Shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Google Announces APIs Scheduled for Shutdown

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There seems to be at least one lesson here for developers relying on Google's good will.

Take your pick:

a) Don't rely on Google to keep services around forever

b) Ain't no such thing as a free lunch

c) Google has only one true product, and it's advertising

d) <feel free to add more>

Despite extraordinary profits, Google is really starting to tighten the reigns. I'm guessing that speaks to a feeling of market saturation. They may no longer be on a breakneck growth curve like in the old days.

Never, ever, under no circumstances, base your only product on the goodwill of another company.

Unless you can buy them, but, in that case, expect to pay more than everyone else, because you are the one who should be desperate for the deal.

> c) Google has only one true product, and it's advertising

I would argue that Google's one true product is you (the user, and data about that user). Advertising is simply their primary (currently?) means to sell that product (you) to other companies/businesses.

With adsense they can still sell ads even if they do not have 'you'.

... only guessing of course. have no idea if gmail makes more with ads than the whole of adsense.

You make a good point.

I imagine (very much a guess on my part) that Google would prefer to have eyeballs on their own impressions of adsense than those on other sites though -- because there would be no payout in those cases.

Still, I would think that serving ad impressions on 3rd party sites is likely a large part of their current business. Maybe those are just eyeballs they rent as appose to own then. ;)

My coworker and I spent the last several months building an iPad app on top of the News Search API. And now all that work is for naught! That is a serious bummer.

You can use the NewsCred API (developer.newscred.com) if you want. We'll make it free forever if you email me.

This make me think about something Fred Wilson said at TC Disrupt ...

Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch. (link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...)

I've spent the last few days trying to use the terribly documented (and frequently changing) Facebook API ... and I wonder, why am I putting myself through this abuse? FB is not unique here ... Twitter's APIs are pretty flakey too in terms of how often they fail. It made me realize that my objectives and that of my API's provider are clearly not the same.

I love APIs but I'm tired of getting beaten up by them. </rant>

Perhaps there's a SaaS opportunity to build an intermediary API for these other services. It would present a single, sensible, unified API to developers, and would negotiate all of the crappy APIs of other services on the other side.

Facebook changes their API? No problem, API Intermediary simply updates its Facebook API calls once, maintaining the same developer-facing API as before. Google Translate gets deprecated? No problem, API Intermediary just switches translation providers to Microsoft.

Of course this would be a ton of work to build and maintain, but therein lies the value to others. Because of that, it probably couldn't be free (who would want that headache for nothing?) and it would probably not always offer the full range of capabilities that direct API access would, but it may still be profitable.

I believe there is an opportunity.

I believe the biggest hurdle with Enterprise adoption of SaaS is data integration and effectively all SaaS vendors combined are building the tower of babel. We are a SaaS company, we only use SaaS products and we probably have about 15 of them. Some of them integrate because they partner with NetSuite, other are stand alone and that is OK for now but for true Business Intelligence we need them to integrate. Infomatica is doing a booming business, inpart to the SaaS demands.

Interesting... what functionality does Netsuite offer? Sorry ...noob question :p

They're shutting down the translate API? I hope they're releasing a replacement - it's incredibly powerful, though I can't see how it commercially benefits them.

That one surprised me the most. Message at http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/overview.html:

"The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element."

Surely "abuse" means they built something people want. Sad that they don't seem to think it would be worth their while to charge for it.

The "abuse" is easily organized charging for the service and including a TOS. I hope they realize that there is a business adding APIs and offering a self service console like adwords.

I call it: "Google NoAPIs". And I even wrote an article about it at: http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/

Or at /least/ allowing people to cache the resulting data... it was downright stupid that the Translate API's terms of service demanded that, even if a hundred thousand people all wanted a single sentence translated, you could not save the result of the single call and reuse it: you had to have all hundred thousand of those people make their own request.

Perhaps "abuse" means toys like this: http://www.translationparty.com/

That's an anecdotal toy... Do you have other examples?

That's not abuse... they could easily have blocked a single website. I'm thinking it would have to be spammers using google translate to generate content or something.

I think the "abuse" they are referring to is the common practise among blackhats of using Google Translate to spin stolen content to make it unique. Translating English -> $LANGUAGE -> English makes for a cheap, low grade article rewriter.

Now Google Translate could pass information to their search quality team so that they can recognise this stolen content. Might be computationally/resource expensive, though.

maybe it's an issue that they are worried competitors will use the API to reverse engineer parts of the core algorithm?

The only API's I've used, that are being shut down, are the Translation and Image Search. I had a little app that looked up the original word and translated word then displayed images; that way I had a better reference to what that word meant(Rosetta Stone). It was just a toy, but I'm sad to see it go!

Shutting down the Wave API seems to be the final nail in the coffin since they decided to discontinue Google Wave, in August of last year.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave...

That is a bummer. I guess the question is; what are the alternatives for the translate API?

Microsoft's translator api -http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/

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