Google is not your daddy: long term reliance on APIs is as bad as outsourcing

I think a development team needs to ask itself if the api is stable and has a stable team behind it. Example Java libraries. If so, use it. If it has a company like Google or a small open source team, then protect your self by isolating the use of the api. Create a library that maps from your own internal api to the outside api. Even if it is a direct one-to-one mapping, you have only one place to make changes if the outside api becomes an orphan.

Both Google and developers are at fault here. If even Google can't keep an API alive for more than a couple of years, I think it goes without saying you should NEVER rely on ANY API, simply because you should never rely on any other company to dictate your business success or failure. You can test with APIs, play with data, use them as a form of redundancy or simplification of a longer process, but if you're build a sandcastle with other people's sand, you have no one to blame but yourself. You're building a bullshit company.

On the other hand, Google has clearly gone the way of flighty Yahoo, coming out with promising tools then letting them die on the vine. This is not OK - they are wasting developers' time, consumers' time and their own staffs' time. So you can't argue that Google isn't at fault here.

But short term has its benefits i.e. Tweetdeck

The sad thing is that this is very true. The worst part is that no-one believes you until the provider of the API goes under or they break it.