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> The company didn’t even officially announce the abandonment of the API. Instead, the notice came in the form of an updated Frequently Asked Questions page out

• dx034 10y ago
  A blog article so that everyone who follows Google's announcement will be informed? Blog articles will also be picked up by many tech pages, so it's effectively the NYT equivalent for tech.
• sametmax 10y ago
  An article in their blog, at least, explaining their decision and making an official apology. It's good to let people know about it, but it's unprofessional to not publicly acknowledge it. At the very least it's a matter of respect for your community.
  • jamespo 10y ago
    Official apology for retiring a free API?
    • jsnathan 10y ago
      Seems to me that when you intentionally lead people to believe that they can depend on you for something in a way that they wouldn't otherwise have, you create an obligation for yourself to keep that promise. Should be that way, anyway.
    • sametmax 10y ago
      In the case of Google, it's been building product during the last 10 years by doing the following: - offering a free product; - letting people build stuff with it; - create some sort of business model and profit. Google relies on the community to live. e.g: there would be no android without dev creating app for it, so they provide a system API letting you create something on it. Without that, Android would be an empty shell. It's a win-win situation, but to work it needs respect from both sides. Here, I don't see any kind of respect from Google, just another beta product trashed. They have the right to do it, but as a developer, I have the right to not want my time wasted. Hence, if Google wants its community to thrives, it needs to be nice with the people being part of it.
  • robbiemitchell 10y ago
    Why do they need to apologize?
    • arcticfox 10y ago
      Because they wasted people's time building on their platform? A successful API requires trust that it will continue, or there's no point in using it. Erode the trust, erode the power of the API publisher. Having been burned by Google API shutdowns before, I just don't use them any more. Obviously they're under no obligation to maintain APIs, but if they want people to keep using them for whatever reason, maintaining trust is important.
      • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        And in this computer age, we have to suspect keeping an API available is just some cloud resource of negligible expense. Shutting them down may feed some Google manager's OCD impulse, but can't be saving any money.
        • aiiane 10y ago
          There is not just a computing resource cost involved - keeping an API around means continuing to support the quirks of that interface, which means code complexity and maintenance costs, especially when the system the API talked to gets refactored and/or overhauled. Google's internal refactoring strategy frequently relies heavily on a monolithic code repository and the ability to rebuild the world; the more that interfaces are unable to change the harder refactoring becomes.
          • asciimike 10y ago
            +1000 to this. The "API" that developers see is the tip of the iceberg for what actually goes into publicly exposing a service to developers. Yes there's quite a bit of internal maintenance that goes on (as mentioned, lots of things change frequently, though generally people refactoring chunks of code will "upgrade" your code for you, since if they don't they can't submit their changes since you were a good engineer and wrote defensive unit tests to protect your code). Maintaining a public API can also mean having: - Documentation (up to 15 languages) - Sample code/example apps (up to 7 languages) - Support (Stack Overflow, Quora, etc.) - An on-call rotation