Skyscanner also recently made it tougher to get at live airfare data through their API[1]. Sad to see providers disappear for this. Not sure what the alternatives are now. [1] https://support.business.skyscanner.net/hc/en-us/articles/21...
"You don't need to take any action. However, if you are actively using this product you may want to find an alternate solution before April 10, 2018." So, you do need to take action? That's a pretty terrible set of FAQs. They should at least provide a list of alternatives.
So is this a new opportunity for someone to fill this need, or this is a really hard service to offer? As per other comments: doesn't seem to be much choice in the space anymore.
Reminds me of my time spent being a customer to a real estate MLS. When industries traditionally rented access to information asymmetry, even if those rents have since diminished, there's a lingering cultural momentum not to "show your hand" by playing nice with information (in addition to these not being organizations with the insight and incentives aligned to be attractive or conducive to IT competence).
Not coincidentally these are also industries with the most middlemen.
Not really. I never signed a SLA with my power or water company. We know they try to keep the service(s) "up"... but if they can't, they can't. Sadly, people riot and fight over much less than the loss of an API... just wait until black friday or some team wins or loses a game.
> I never signed a SLA with my power or water company. We know they try to keep the service(s) "up"... but if they can't, they can't. In Italy, these services must be provided by law. Even small mountain towns where it's not profitable to provide the service must be covered. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't the case in any first world country.
I think you might be misunderstanding. You're seem to be talking about how much coverage is required for utilities. The person you're responding to appears to be specifically talking about the (lack of) guarantees for uptime, recovery, etc... for someone who already has service.
In the US, required coverage mandates are up to individual states to set and varies.
Six months ago, I started developing a Flight Alerting service for QPX Express API. I was always skeptical as to how long would they keep this API running, since it was a byproduct of a previous acquisition. But I said to myself, wishfully thinking: Why would they shut down this and lose their clients trust in developing with their APIs? Sadly, I was again proven wrong.
If a client hasn't learned by now, they're not gonna learn from this either. For niche apis Google has no trust left to burn, because all trust in its products is either already burnt or inflammable.
I was looking into this space some time ago. Got a feeling that this offering was quite unique, I don't think other vendors are offering this information with pay-as-you-go arrangements suitable for small projects. (But I might be wrong with this)
I was part of a team developing a travel product which needed huge amounts of data from flights to car rental... My god the travel industry is a mess in terms of accessible data. It was the biggest pain point. API's would randomly change structure, endpoints would stop working with unknown errors, data would be significantly different across companies for the same data etc... It was a shambles. Never again will I dev…
Reminds me of my time spent being a customer to a real estate MLS. When industries traditionally rented access to information asymmetry, even if those rents have since diminished, there's a lingering cultural momentum not to "show your hand" by playing nice with information (in addition to these not being organizations with the insight and incentives aligned to be attractive or conducive to IT competence).
Ive worked with MLS data before. It was terrible. I am currently working with ACH, DDF and I am astounded that our financial system even operates. Because if there is one thing you want in payment processing, it's wildly innacurate and inconsistent data that is lacking documentation.
I was part of a team developing a travel product which needed huge amounts of data from flights to car rental... My god the travel industry is a mess in terms of accessible data. It was the biggest pain point. API's would randomly change structure, endpoints would stop working with unknown errors, data would be significantly different across companies for the same data etc... It was a shambles. Never again will I dev…
How did you integrate all the different schemas? RDF, some kind of rule engine, or plain Java, Python, ... ?
Nit: "inflammable" means "can be set of fire". So does "flammable". Yes, I know. You want "not flammable", or if you want to be cute you could try "unflammable".
Looks like the post means 'either already burnt or will be burnt easily'? So what exactly is your nitpick here?
That doesn't make much sense. Why would the easily-burnt trust still be intact at this point? It's a really weird comment if it wasn't supposed to mean "already burnt, or unable to burn".