Devs using it should replace it with AccuWeather's API's. I've always liked AccuWeather's forecasts. They seemed, well, acurrate.
Google kills weather API - apps go down
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Google kills weather API - apps go down
#12>Google has shut down its weather API without a word and stranded developers who relied on it to power their weather-related applications. It was a private undocumentated API used internally. Using it was always a big risk.
You're right that using it was always a risk, and as the article says, Google were completely within their right to shut it down without any warning.
However, wouldn't it have served them better from a PR point of view to give a warning, even if only a week in advance? If all these people have been using it for so long, another week of bandwidth/etc. isn't exactly going to break the bank, and it would have been the nice thing to do, to come out and say "hey, you weren't meant to be doing this, but we'll be helpful and give you a heads up to give you time to move off it".
Re: Google kills weather API - apps go down
#13>Google has shut down its weather API without a word and stranded developers who relied on it to power their weather-related applications. It was a private undocumentated API used internally. Using it was always a big risk.
You're right that using it was always a risk, and as the article says, Google were completely within their right to shut it down without any warning. However, wouldn't it have served them better from a PR point of view to give a warning, even if only a week in advance? If all these people have been using it for so long, another week of bandwidth/etc. isn't exactly going to break the bank, and it would have been the n…
It's funny, they did give a warning of sorts.
Around a month prior to turning everything off, they started throwing in a random 403 to requests. No reasoning - just like it was being added by them to deter use.
I noticed this and just simply put in a try/catch, which "solved" the problem. Luckily I'm not building a business on it (that'd be pretty silly) so the downtime isn't the end of the world.
Here's a Stack Overflow post from during the "warning period": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11878143/google-weather-a...
Seems like it was their way of giving us a heads up.
Re: Google kills weather API - apps go down
#14FWIW, the iGoogle API started getting flaky a couple weeks ago, intermittently returning error responses. So there was a little bit of warning.
A couple of other (supported) weather API alternatives.
* http://www.worldweatheronline.com/free-weather-feed.aspx -- free with attribution, paid option to remove attribution. (We ended up going with this for our site.)
* http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs -- free at developer usage levels, free allowance for sending traffic to their site, can get kind of pricey if you use it a lot and weather isn't central to what you do.
Incidentally, either of these will deliver a lot more weather data than you were getting with iGoogle.
Re: Google kills weather API - apps go down
#15I wrote about this some years ago. Since Google’s Weather API is completely officially undocumented it’s worth noting that in future it may be wise to use Yahoo’s weather API, which is fully and officially documented. * http://labs.phurix.net/posts/weather-tcl
Your post was one that popped up on my google search for more information.
Awesome.
Re: Google kills weather API - apps go down
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right that using it was always a risk, and as the article says, Google were completely within their right to shut it down without any warning. However, wouldn't it have served them better from a PR point of view to give a warning, even if only a week in advance? If all these people have been using it for so long, another week of bandwidth/etc. isn't exactly going to break the bank, and it would have been the n…
It's funny, they did give a warning of sorts. Around a month prior to turning everything off, they started throwing in a random 403 to requests. No reasoning - just like it was being added by them to deter use. I noticed this and just simply put in a try/catch, which "solved" the problem. Luckily I'm not building a business on it (that'd be pretty silly) so the downtime isn't the end of the world. Here's a Stack Over…
The 403s probably were Google already shutting down the system. They have many servers performing the same functions; propagating a new version of the server software (in this case, an update with the weather API stripped) can take days, and in the mean time, it's luck of the draw whether you're on an old functioning server, or a new 403-spitting one. This is entirely by design: this way, if there's something wrong with an update, it doesn't immediately affect everyone, and they can hotfix things before it runs on all servers.