Impossible to scale: Google+ API limited to 10,000 requests per day

89n.com

12 points·zemaj··4 comments

I really don't understand why google released their api with a 1k/day limit. I could see this being a problem for a weekend hackathon. How many people are going to devote time to a real project reliant on any api with such a low api limit... my guess, not many.

TL/DR- 89n requested a limit bump to 1m requests/day but only got 10k/day.

Facebook's open graph seems to have a 100m/day/app limit. (http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-Facebook-Open-Graph-API-rate-...)

They do the same with Google App Engine. They pretend their cloud platform scale but, because of quotas, a GAE app can't scale much. Technically it can, but not without Google's permission. And they have no contractual obligation to let their customers' apps grow, it's legally just a favor they might offer to whichever customer they fancy.

So this Google+ quota isn't surprising, coming from Google.

This is just one reason that providing a good, robust API is so important: people will just page-scrape.

In the early days of audioscrobbler/last.fm, I added comments to the HTML of our pages, asking people who were writing scrapers to get in touch so we can add additional webservices.

It's much cheaper to serve up an API request, and trying to block scraping is futile.

Has anyone else had a better experience with the Google+ API? It really worries me that this means that no businesses can be built on top of the G+ API. Less developer investment means less options for users. Data becomes less open.

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