Glad I stuck to scraping Google Translate, and not using the API. Cheaper and a better long-term solution.
Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
41–50 of 185 posts
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#42The way I look at it, Apple and Microsoft have ecosystems that allow others to profit from software development. Google has an ecosystem that allows others to profit from advertising. Of course, you can development software products around Google's platforms, but I'm only seeing a handful of success stories in comparison to the other two.
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#43Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the point of this whole release a free API, shut it down nonsense. I wouldn't mind paying for any of Google's APIs.
If you pay for an API, and it doesn't work, you can show economic harm and that gives you a basis to sue. I know from experience that a number of Google's APIs are just some engineer's idea of how to hook into the data stored in the back end which Google puts out there for some easy (and free) goodwill but without any commitment ever to actually do the necessary foundational work to support it as a product (which the…
Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest.
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#45You mean, why should you build a for-profit product while relying on someone else's not-for-profit API? I'm guessing you shouldn't! I've seen a lot of neat projects come from Google APIs, but that's as far as I'd taking it. Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane. 1 exception, though: Getting started. I could see using Google to get off the ground and then switching to a more r…
As a counterpoint, many companies are built off of APIs that are out there. That's the nature of business and that's actually great for the API authors out there. But if developers knew that APIs could easily go away, then people wouldn't build businesses on top of those APIs. The risk would be too high. I don't know the history but it seems that Google could've implemented some simple solutions to prevent abuse of t…
I'm just guessing here but in this case it could be that the abuse doesn't mean extra traffic but people using it to generate text to fill pages with, in effect tricking the search engine.
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#46You mean, why should you build a for-profit product while relying on someone else's not-for-profit API? I'm guessing you shouldn't! I've seen a lot of neat projects come from Google APIs, but that's as far as I'd taking it. Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane. 1 exception, though: Getting started. I could see using Google to get off the ground and then switching to a more r…
Google's App Engine is pretty much a for-profit API.
And now they've announced a change in their pricing scheme, which if true, would change App Engine from pay-what-you-use to same-as-amazon-aws-but-pricier scheme, which makes it hugely expensive for a large portion of devs that have built on top of App Engine. And migrating away from App Engine is a total pain in the ass.
I truly hope that the blog-post missed important details or that they'll keep providing the old option too (i.e. paying per cpu-hour instead of instance-hour).
I know App Engine was beta, but people have built on it expecting instability in the implementation, not in its pricing scheme. I mean, come on!
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#47Question: Can anyone recommend another Translation API? The problem is that the translation work that Google does is the best out there that I've seen, and I'm not even sure if there's a decent alternative to be found.
Full disclosure: I currently work with the company detailed below (myGengo).
Depending on your needs, you could consider human based translation, which is generally more accurate than machine-based translation. Over at myGengo (http://mygengo.com/) we offer an API to help people get translations done by an actual translator, as opposed to a machine (think Mechanical Turk, but focused on translation). Feel free to check it out - various libraries abound:
http://mygengo.com/services/api/
An advantage to going with this approach is that the myGengo API can also return a machine translation while a job is being worked on; a takeaway here is that even if a service like Google shuts down, it should be fairly simple to use another service behind the scenes, keeping a nice level of transparency for you.
Of course, if you'd like to stick with general machine translations, you could check out the following - should be close enough:
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#48Offering an API, paid or unpaid, is not making an unending commitment to support it forever. If it was, businesses would simply not offer APIs. When someone offers a product or service, they have to right to decide later on to not offer that service any more. That is simply the nature of any business arrangement where you are depending on an entity not under your control. Would the OP prefer that Google and other com…
Nobody is arguing that they don't have the right, but there are social implications to doing so. People have the right to not like them because of it.
You also have the right to not write thank-you cards when people do nice things for you, but those people have the right to react to your selfishness.
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#49How frustrating. I built something just last week using the translate, transliterate, and diacritize APIs. These are/were really useful APIs for creating language tools.
Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
#50Google has made some unpopular developer-facing moves lately (App Engine pricing changes come to mind), and it seems entirely out-of-character. From now on, any API announcement from Google should be accompanied with a GIANT expiration date stamped all over it by default. Then, if it keeps going... happy surprise!
That's silly. They wouldn't develop something with the plan of cancelling it.
Why not? Roll something out, and say you'll commit to providing it for a certain amount of time. If, after that time, it doesn't seem worth it to keep it going (by any metric you decide), pull it. You've given fair warning.
Of course, I imagine that sort of thing would hurt adoption quite a bit.