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Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

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Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

#131
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest.

"Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest." Nasmorn's Law

Nasmorn's Razor

Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

#132
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane Tweetdeck anyone? And Zynga (FB is its lifeblood) Google shutting down an API that thousands of developers are relying on without much warning is insane. The web is an increasingly competitive space and there are lots of walled gardens to worry about. Google openly encourages developers to build on top of and use its APIs and it prides it…

>> Tweetdeck anyone? And Zynga (FB is its lifeblood) Exceptions are not the rule.

But huge, glaring exceptions can disprove a 'rule'. Risky? sure. Insane? These examples strongly indicate otherwise.

Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

#133

I keep hearing about hypothetical for-profit products and people's weekend hobby projects being affected by this change, but does anyone have any example of an actual business that will be affected by this change? Note that most of these APIs have 3 year deprecation policies and so will continue to be around; only the translate api is going away (and that's in December). I have serious doubts that almost anyone would…

We use Google Translate where I work for a some very small customer service related tasks. Our business is not "built on" Google Translate (and has nothing to do with translation), but it solves some small problems for us and is easily worth $10-20 a month for a low volume of requests. Actually, since we already have it integrated and are happy with it, we'd probably pay more just to have the problems solved so we can focus on really important things.

Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

#136
post #63

Google 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!

I agree, something strange is definitely going on internally at Google. I actually attribute it to starting with the shutdown of Wave and the floundering about with Buzz and other products since then. One thing that Google has been excellent at doing is building up the perception that they have near limitless computing power at their disposal. These kinds of shutdowns, and the reasons given, are doing immense harm to…

Computing power, sure, but who's running it?

Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

#137
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between flicking a switch to turn off python 2, and slowly deprecating it over a period of years to a new (better) system with well doucmented differences and a clear migration path. Python 3 started in 2006 ( http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/ ), if you've managed to stave off software rot for the last 5 years, I'm sure you can take the extra step to support python 3.

Upgrading to Python 3 is simply not an option for me at this time as I am depending on libraries that still require me to be using Python 2: Python 2->3 is an "all or nothing" endeavor due to the horrendously incompatible way they have handled this transition. I mean: the fact that five years /have/ passed and Python 3 is still a silly pipe dream for almost all users of Python should tell you something about how poor…

> the fact that five years /have/ passed and Python 3 is still a silly pipe dream for almost all users of Python should tell you something about how poorly this was done.

So far, it has been just how it was meant to be. It was never the goal for Python 3 to be the default Python version by year 2011.

Re: Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

#138
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are billion dollar companies like NetFlix completely reliant on AWS APIs.

I would be willing to bet that most of them have mitigation strategies in place that they can, at least in part, switch to. They don't use them because they are less cost effective than AWS (or other current providers) but they should be able to switch with relatively little notice.

I believe you, but I would be willing to bet those mitigation strategies are a few unmaintained word documents that would be grossly insufficient if it actually came that far.

I don't see why NetFlix would have to be more paranoid about AWS, then say Apple about Foxconn. Business is business, except at Google.

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