Google to offer for-pay Translate API • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to offer for-pay Translate API

#41

Post by DanielRibeiro » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 5:20 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #13

If they had just announced they would be charging for it people would also be upset. By announcing they're shutting it down, then backpedaling a little by offering to charge for it developers can't be as upset. Genius!

I was actually expecting the whole "shutting down" announcement to be a Lean Startup-esque experiment. If it is, I am really glad, because I'd rather that companies (startups or not) focus on things that people really want.

I can't help but imagine all the good Google could have done if it had done this go Wave (either by pivoting it into a better product, or by leaping the whole team into greener fields sooner).

Re: Google to offer for-pay Translate API

#42

Post by jellicle » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 6:28 PM UTC

myth_drannon wrote: post #39

It's absolutely unbelievable that for a solved problem we don't have reliable offerings and need to beg Google/Microsoft for an api access or buy expensive enterprise software. How difficult is to take one of the thousands open source translation libraries that every university's linguistics department offers and turn it to some semi-correct service

If it's that easy, perhaps you should do it in your spare time next weekend.

Re: Google to offer for-pay Translate API

#43

Post by myth_drannon » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 7:45 PM UTC

jellicle wrote: post #42

myth_drannon wrote: post #39

It's absolutely unbelievable that for a solved problem we don't have reliable offerings and need to beg Google/Microsoft for an api access or buy expensive enterprise software. How difficult is to take one of the thousands open source translation libraries that every university's linguistics department offers and turn it to some semi-correct service

If it's that easy, perhaps you should do it in your spare time next weekend.

Well I didn't say it's easy (at least to me, I have zero education in machine translation) but some people spend their entire lives working on it(using our tax money) and just don't feel the need to make something public facing out of their projects except dumping the zipped source code on sourceforge.

P.S. And by the way I tried not to use the google api (well before the announcement) and wrote a basic word by word translation which obviously gives dismal results (https://github.com/aparij/bl)

Re: Google to offer for-pay Translate API

#44

Post by esrauch » Sun, Jun 05, 2011, 6:09 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #26

esrauch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are winning the web war since their messaging has basically completely displaced AIM, MSN and GChat in the US in the 16-26 year olds. Its also put a decent dent into email for asynch communication, and I only expect that to continue.

Oh no! What will Google do without all the money they make from GChat?

I don't really understand your point; any amount of money that they make from search or gmail or docs is just because someone is on that page and sees ads. The exact same situation applies with GChat assuming you use it through the gmail interface rather than through an alternate client (which most people do).

Re: Google to offer for-pay Translate API

#45

Post by esrauch » Sun, Jun 05, 2011, 6:17 PM UTC

cdcarter wrote: post #21

esrauch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are winning the web war since their messaging has basically completely displaced AIM, MSN and GChat in the US in the 16-26 year olds. Its also put a decent dent into email for asynch communication, and I only expect that to continue.

I don't see facebook overtaking email in professional situations for a long time.

Honestly, I think it's pretty likely that Facebook will tend towards with people having "Professional" profiles offsetting LinkedIn and they will offset email.

Obviously at this point it is largely just offsetting personal email, but I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss that as insignificant.