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Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

463 points by bauchidgw 15y ago

jmathai 15y ago
I can't state this enough. Building your company which heavily relies on an API provided by someone else is risky business. Why are we still in this infatuation stage of ignoring the pitfalls of this?
- raganwald 15y ago
  This shit still happens?? and people fall for it?! http://raganwald.posterous.com/this-shit-still-happens-and-people-fall-for-i http://raganwald.posterous.com/this-shit-still-happens-and-p...
- qq66 15y ago
  I think relying on a free API is the problem, not any API. When you pay per request for access to an API, at a level that can make the provider as well as you profitable, you can have some comfort in the fact that if your provider goes down there will likely be a competitor to spring up in its place.
  - saraid216 15y ago
    It depends on how much of your revenue is based off access to the API. Every moment without access is lost revenue; that can break a startup. If your startup could survive if you switched off the API, then you're fine.
  - lurker19 15y ago
    As long as you are willing to wait 5 or 10 years for someone to replicate Google's R&D.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  I think you can state this in a different way, "Why would I invest in a company which will be killed by Google changing its mind about an API?" I imagine (but it's pure speculation) that folks like YC, other Angels, or early stage VC's should as their due diligence point out this risk and without a reasonable mitigation option pass on funding. This would 'self correct' folks who weren't doing the extra work. However for things where there isn't really a credible way to come up with an alternative you are kind of screwed. But then it would become a Google problem if they didn't get API adoption without offering some sort of indemnification in the event they need to take it back. I presume the 'translation abuse' is people using it to send spam in 141 different languages.
  - pfhayes 15y ago
    If the abuse is translating spam, then that's even more surprising - because that's exactly the kind of abuse that Gmail already prevents all the time. It even seems like a great opportunity for Google to gather spam data in all sorts of languages.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Actually this is even more specific, which is building your product on a webservice provided by someone else is risky. Unlike a library you download, a webservice ends the day they cut access to it. With a library you can continue to use it, and slowly rebuild your product to use a different library (or even use that library forever if it works for you), but with a web service it works 100% today and tomorrow it doesn't work at all.
- chc 15y ago
  You mean like .NET? Or Cocoa Touch? Or DOM? Or Node? Or POSIX? At some point, we're all relying on APIs provided by somebody else. I think that's why it's so easy for people to ignore the pitfalls of just a little bit more.
  - cookiecaper 15y ago
    The difference is that those APIs are "non-cloud". The code necessary to run those APIs is spread far and wide and no one can just centrally "turn off" .NET or POSIX. Perhaps over time the programs written for unmaintained APIs will fail on newer platforms, but you will always have the means to go back to the old system and run your dependent programs there. In Google's web-based system, Google is the only one with the keys necessary to keep that engine running, and if they take their ball and go home, all of that API's users are screwed.
  - eli 15y ago
    If Microsoft stopped all .NET support today, my .NET apps will still keep running. Big difference.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - GoodIntentions 15y ago
    umm, no one can shut down POSIX. not really a comparison.
  - kevinpet 15y ago
    In this case, people are using "API" to refer to the service. The google translate service is being shut down for non-human users.
- tybris 15y ago
  There are billion dollar companies like NetFlix completely reliant on AWS APIs.
  - billswift 15y ago
    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.
    - tybris 15y ago
      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.
      - lurker19 15y ago
        Netflix is actually pretty well known for its resiliency to AWS outages.
DanI-S 15y ago
The original post mentions a 3-year deprecation period. Given the speed of technological progression, that would be pretty difficult for me to complain about. Edit: The Translate API, specifically mentioned, will be deprecated December 2011. That's pretty soon.
thetrumanshow 15y ago
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!
- rcfox 15y ago
  That's silly. They wouldn't develop something with the plan of cancelling it.
  - kelnos 15y ago
    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.
    - esrauch 15y ago
      Most of the APIs are going to be up for 3 more years, the only one you can possibly complain about is the Translate API.
- SriniK 15y ago
  Google is doing the right thing that would be typical for an internet company. For any product they would need to have maintainers/owners who are continuously updating and monitoring. It is completely waste of time to maintain unused stuff.
  - alanh 15y ago
    You are making a false assumption. I personally use the FeedBurner API to keep track of feed subscribers, for example, and it was deprecated yesterday.
Gunther 15y ago
I would be very interested in seeing how many developers would pay for the Translate API if Google had decided to monetize it instead of deprecating it then shutting it down as some of the commentors on the blog had suggested. At the same time if the Google Translate API is such a popular service then maybe there is enough demand to support a startup providing a Translate API ;)
- drndown2008 15y ago
  I would pay for what I use which isn't a whole lot, but it will be hard to find a programmable replacement like the Translate API. It's also a little hard to believe that it was a "financial burden" for one of the richest corporations in the world.
  - frisco 15y ago
    It's also a little hard to believe that it was a "financial burden" for one of the richest corporations in the world. I think you underestimate the computational resources required here.
    - GoodIntentions 15y ago
      They have something like 37 Billion dollars in retained earning and don't pay a dividend. They didn't get that mountain of cash by losing money on things. Assure yourself, if you are using a free google-anything, somehow or other, it adds to their income.
- cschep 15y ago
  I was thinking exactly this.. is this basically a list of already vetted startup ideas? There is clearly demand!
- frisco 15y ago
  Starting a startup to replace Google Translate wouldn't be a simple proposition. Google's translation algorithms are considered best-of-breed and involve highly sophisticated statistical machine learning trained over a significant portion of their web crawl corpus data. Their staff scientists and engineers working on Translate are some of the best in the field, and the complexity here should not be underestimated. That said: yes, there's very obviously an opportunity here for the right team; but that opportunity is so big, its been there this entire time, even with the Google Translate API around.
wccrawford 15y ago
You 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 reliable API (read: paid for) afterwards.
- tybris 15y ago
  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.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    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 they are really really bad at, in case you haven't noticed). So the point is they use the API internally, exposing it gives them additional testing and additional feedback on how to make it better. Once the cost incurred by offering it for free exceeeds the benefits of the testing they pull it back. Continuing to use the now 'well tested and well rounded' API internally. GOOG-411 was a great example of this. It was a great way to get voice samples from a lot of people by bartering a service. Once their voice training parameters weren't getting better they turn off the service, (cuts costs) but they still get the durable benefit of a well trained voice recognition library.
    - nasmorn 15y ago
      Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest.
      - 15y ago
dstein 15y ago
It's really too bad. The Translate API was super, super fun to play with. I made myself a cute little interface to translate JavaScript or CSV arrays into multiple languages simultaneously. I envisioned being able to build fully self-translating web applications. And there's no other company providing this type of technology in this fashion. If there's any startup working in this area, here's your chance.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  Agreed. This is a great opportunity for a startup to swoop in, clone the Google API so the only change necessary is authentication tokens and URI, and get everyone to switch to their (paid) platform.
  - jan_g 15y ago
    It's hard for a startup to "swoop in", because Google uses statistical analysis in it's translation software if I understand correctly various articles about this topic. This means that they have thousands of correctly translated documents from which the software learns. And (so they say) it gets better and better with time, because they feed it more and more documents in various languages. I'm sure I've overly simplified the Google's implementation and there's a lot more to it, but I'm trying to make a point :) In short, it takes considerable amount of resources to make it work on a Google translate level.
    - cookiecaper 15y ago
      Sure, but a business that depends on this functionality would probably take "somewhat worse translation quality" over "completely dead translation capability". As the startup gets funding and customers, they can focus on performing the same kind of analysis and focusing specifically on translation, instead of the buckshot approach taken by Google. I am completely confident that a startup staffed with talented people can match Google Translate's quality in a reasonable amount of development time, and in the meantime, something is better than nothing.
jcampbell1 15y ago
Google cites abuse as the reason for shutting down the translate API. I find it ironic that they have engineers smart enough to write software that can translate human language between hundreds of language pairs, but can't write software to stop abuse. I'll let Google in on a little secret: If you charge more for a service than it costs you to provide, then there is no such thing as abuse.
- code_duck 15y ago
  Well, maybe not just that type of abuse, overusage without benefit to Google. Of course there could still be abuse of some sort, like somehow using a service to spread spam or malware.
  - BlazingFrog 15y ago
    Somehow I doubt that's the abuse they are concerned about.
    - code_duck 15y ago
      Not in this case, but I don't think they consider spam and malware to be welcome. What I mean to say is that even profitable services can be abused, though if we want to choose a more specific word than 'abuse', the point may be moot.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  The cost in goodwill (and perhaps even real money) of using translate to fill hundreds/thousands of google ad-filled spam sites in hundreds of different languages may be much higher than they could ever conceivably recoup in charging for the API. Once you charge more than any legitimate user would be willing to pay for the API, you are effectively shutting down the API anyway.
  - cookiecaper 15y ago
    Are spammers going to be willing to pay x cents/call just to fill spam pages with translations? We must make x high enough that spammers will not make enough profit to justify the expense but legitimate businesses that depend on the API will still be able to pay for it. Spam is all about maximum distribution and massiveness, so I don't think the pricing would have to be very high to take the profitability out of the spam operations.
krisrak 15y ago
Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company.
- mindcrime 15y ago
  Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company. I think a better statement is "Never rely on anyone's API unless you have a contractual agreement and SLA in place, and a backup plan for if/when the API goes away; building something on an API otherwise is a mashup/side-project not a startup/company."
- code_duck 15y ago
  Pretty sure that's not what TweetDeck is thinking this week.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    But it's probably what all the other Twitter clients are thinking. :-)
    - code_duck 15y ago
      Doubtlessly. I hate being in the thrall of a company in such a way too. It's dangerous to be dependent upon someone else's their API. But is the chance of great success lower than for with other businesses? Probably better to start a Twitter client than a to-do list site or something.
- gte910h 15y ago
  All business is risk. This is yet one more risk. Hundreds if not thousands of successful businesses work on top of other businesses.
- drcube 15y ago
  Also, you shouldn't ever write a program with dependencies. :P
neovive 15y ago
The announcements seem impact the smaller, niche, API's. It's unlikely that this would ever happen to large API's such as Maps, Analytics, etc. However, the Translate API was definitely very cool.
- taken11 15y ago
  it happened for the search api
orblivion 15y ago
Google shuts down several of countless, FREE APIs, on which the foundations of many startups rest. "Google is just another company who doesn't care about developers." What? A little gratitude, at least, before suggesting how things could be better.
- chc 15y ago
  Gratitude for what? Ripping out "the foundations of many startups"? In many cases, offering something and then rescinding at the last minute is worse than not offering in the first place. (I'm not personally mad and wouldn't have built a business around this API. But creating false expectations is not a good thing.)
  - orblivion 15y ago
    That's reasonable, but I think it's sortof unclassy to ignore the fact that they "cared" (as much as a company can really care) enough to offer it in the first place, and everything else they still offer. On the other hand I'm having mixed feelings now, trying to reconcile this with the way I feel about how Facebook's privacy policy affects users. I just don't get the impression that Google is careless the same way.
- r00fus 15y ago
  The problem is not that google is shutting down some of it's free APIs. Many folks are crying out for a paid version of the Translate API for example. I question the motive behind shuttering a useful and unparalleled API like translate without considering putting a pricetag on it.
michaelpinto 15y ago
Question: 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.
- alienreborn 15y ago
  http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
- Klonoar 15y ago
  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/ 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/ 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: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
  - michaelpinto 15y ago
    thank you!
  - mromaine 15y ago
    Full disclosure: I'm the CTO of myGengo I would also add that because translation is core to our business, we would never deprecate the translation API :)
jsdalton 15y ago
I don't mean to be a stickler, but this is an egregious example of editorializing in the title. Can someone edit it please? I was already well aware of the API deprecation story, but I clicked on this link thinking it was a new article from Google defending the move (or something of the sort).
- corin_ 15y ago
  This submission is linking to a comment, not a news story, and that comment asks "why should any developer, any company which wants to build a valuable product for the long term use any of your APIs ever again?" So, still slightly editorialised title here on HN, but pretty much on the money.
  - jsdalton 15y ago
    I totally missed that. Thank you for clarifying.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- dkarl 15y ago
  The post itself presents an opinion, not a news item, and the title reflects the content of the post.
tomkarlo 15y ago
Offering 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 companies simply not offer APIs?
- dhimes 15y ago
  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.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    I can understand being unhappy because they've decided to deprecate a free API. I disagree with the rage of the OP. This was a free service and they're no longer going to offer it, and they're shutting it down in an orderly manner. That's not selfish. This is more like someone giving you a birthday present every year, and then when they fail to send you one, you write a nasty post about how greedy and selfish they are.
    - wolfhumble 15y ago
      Yes I agree, one should always be grateful! I think it is difficult to compare this to a birthday present you did not receive, though. It is more like they want you to throw away the birthday present you got last year; a present you were grateful for and that now plays an important part in your daily routine.
      - dhimes 15y ago
        Exactly. Would you accept the next gift? Especially when giving the gift isn't a selfless act-- it's only given if it benefits the giver. I don't use their APIs, and am not building a business on anybody else's platform, so it doesn't affect me personally. But if I were doing that, this would make me change my mind.
ankimal 15y ago
Dint Fred Wilson say this at Disrupt NY last week: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit... They should charge for it at the very least. Whats stopping anyone from using a proxy service and hitting their web page? I m sure people would rather pay a little than go through these unnecessarily complicated and unethical practices.
nekitamo 15y ago
Glad I stuck to scraping Google Translate, and not using the API. Cheaper and a better long-term solution.
- dstein 15y ago
  What did you use instead?
  - akanet 15y ago
    He said he scrapes the HTML output of the actual Google Translate web pages.
nhebb 15y ago
The 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.
anorwell 15y ago
How frustrating. I built something just last week using the translate, transliterate, and diacritize APIs. These are/were really useful APIs for creating language tools.
jdvolz 15y ago
I'm leery of building anything on top of someone else's API. I built on top of an API while also keeping in active contact with the company to let them know what I was doing, going as far as talking directly to their legal department, and they still shut me down when they couldn't handle the volume of usage. And this is in a situation where every marginal use of their API made them money. Collectively I was going to make them revenue of (projected admittedly) $1.2M. Didn't stop them from shutting me down. Long story short: Building on someone else's API is a recipe for disaster. Are there times when you have to? Sure. But you need to know what you are getting into.
ojilles 15y ago
FTA: "... so you decided to "das kind mit dem bade ausschuetten" (translate it) ?" Classic :-)
baconner 15y ago
Amazing sense of entitlement in this comment. Google built the apis, they host the apis, they incur costs from this yet provide them for free. Presumably this is because they intend to get some benefit. So its Google's decision if they want to continue to provide them or change the way they work. I use some free apis in my commercial apps but I'm aware that I don't control them nor am I entitled to them. They may change in such a way that I'd have to discontinue a product but that's a responsibility I took on when I decided to use them. Google and other free API providers don't bear reposibility for my decision.
- pettazz 15y ago
  Came here to say this. This guy is complaining because Google is shutting down a service that started to become more of a burden on them to provide than a benefit to the actual developers using it. They're not the goddamned Red Cross, they're a business. A very cool, developer-friendly business, yes, but still.
alanh 15y ago
Given they are deprecating the FeedBurner APIs, is there a good alternative to FeedBurner at this point?
magicalist 15y ago
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 actually pay per translate (and if you would, it's likely you could work out a license deal independent of a public API anyway). It seems like the reaction to this has more to do with annoyance that another cool free service is going away and remaining anger over app engine pricing changes.
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  Yes. I hire many translators. We use google translate, and license professional dictionaries to speedup the process. I estimate that Google translate saves us $20k/year. I personally would be willing to pay a lot for continued access to the translate API. (I'll probably just end up using some sort of iframe hackery when the translate API goes away) The actual business is http://www.yabla.com/ http://www.yabla.com/
  - xpaulbettsx 15y ago
    Check out http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ - I find the translations aren't always as good with idiomatic phrases, but it does a pretty good job and the API is complete and easy to use.
  - dirtyaura 15y ago
    Yabla seems very interesting. Care to share more details? How is it doing, who and where from are the largest user groups, how did you end up with the idea, etc.
- jonnycat 15y ago
  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.
rbranson 15y ago
If they feel as if they can only launch APIs that have indefinite lifetimes, this will seriously hamper their ability to justify building new public APIs. Deprecation is a risk taken anytime software is built on an API, for-profit or not. This is why software should be characterized as "living" and not a static entity.
modernerd 15y ago
Sad to see the Translate API go. Will be interesting to see if crowdsourced translation engines such as http://duolingo.com/ http://duolingo.com/ will one day come to fill Google Translate's shoes.
krisrak 15y ago
Fred Wilson said it the best at TechCrunch Disrupt, - "Don't be a Twitter bitch, Google bitch or facebook bitch. Be your own bitch"
smackfu 15y ago
Are these APIs really so unique that they can't code for some other provider's replacement? Is it just that a for-pay translation API, for instance, is too expensive for a product without a solid business plan to use?
- AashayDesai 15y ago
  And what of open-source projects that rely on such APIs? Are they expected to figure out a way to switch to for-pay APIs as well? Example: https://github.com/Marak/translate.js https://github.com/Marak/translate.js
rachelbythebay 15y ago
There are two kinds of APIs: the ones which are deprecated and the ones which don't exist or work yet.
frytaz 15y ago
booo! where's api replacement ?
whtswthelogin 15y ago
Google admits it doesn't know sh!t about running a stable business. Thanks Google! Ya dumb fvcks.
toddh 15y ago
My guess is Google setup these APIs to help train their learning algorithms. Now that they are trained there's no reason to keep up the service anymore. Maybe the key is to stay away from APIs that do work and don't contribute to revenue?
- rryan 15y ago
  For e.g. the translate API, how could they train their algorithms? There is no feedback associated with it (that I know of).
  - toddh 15y ago
    GOOG-411 is an example of this process. Google got voice samples and users got a service. When the voice training parameters stopped getting better the service was shut off.
  - chris-hexx 15y ago
    Static analysis of lots of human translators' output. Given the input and output of a strange human filter, they're trying to approximate the filter using machine learning. When their algorithm's output approximates the best translations, they're done.
    - rryan 15y ago
      That's one way to train a translation system, but that's not related to the Translate API -- I'm asking, what benefit does Google receive from usage of the API? They already have the entire Internet in their index -- it's not like they need a better source of what phrases exist. The parent implied that Google was using the API to train their MT systems, which I find hard to believe.
senthilnayagam 15y ago
Google aura is gone, without free let us see how it competes with apple, micrsoft
invisible 15y ago
Solution that they chose not to use: API keys. Really messed up of them to jump to completely shutting down without giving some sort of rate limit/access control.
lalmalang 15y ago
Far more likely than 'abuse' (they could have just charged afterall) is probably Google's realization that they have an uncontested lead in machine translation - and there is a lot of money to be made here.. They recently won a contract with the European patent office to machine translate patents for them...
johnx123 15y ago
Why this FUD? Let's scrap or sniff Google tools as before!
iqster 15y ago
Quote from Fred Wilson at TC Disrupt NY: Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch. (link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit... http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...)
adulau 15y ago
Some of the Google API are released early to get contributions, testers and inputs to improve their services. In other words, they abuse their contributors to improve their services without thanking them or helping them on the long-term. The translation service is one of them, the massive improvement of the translation service came from the many inputs received by people using their API. It shows again the importance of building free software along with their free network services. That's quite challenging and difficult but it shows that initiative like http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/ http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/ is not completely useless on the long run.
hessenwolf 15y ago
Hotmail deleted my account after 28 days and i lost contact with all the people i met in my year of travelling. Yahoo killed their spell checking api in april and now i need a new word splitter. Any ideas?
mmccomb 15y ago
Pruning old APIs wouldn't put me off. What puts me off is the inter-dependencies between APIs. Want to use Google Prediction API? Well you'll need a Google Storage API account for that. Oh and, you can only have one of those for free. And just in case, they'll take your billing info. I was psyched to start playing around with the prediction API but just got totally put off by the new API pricing/management. I'd argue that the restrictions are now so tight and cumbersome that there's no real sandbox environment to encourage devs to try out the services. I'm a touch disappointed.
latj 15y ago
Google was ok giving you a connection to translate because you were helping them build up the system. Now the most powerful database of human language is going to be locked up. We should all learn a lesson from this...
- rryan 15y ago
  How does using the translate API help Google? They already have the largest source of natural language text in existence (the web) -- why would they need your translation queries?
pnathan 15y ago
Why should anyone build a business on an API that there isn't a contract in place to require uptime, with appropriate fiscal penalties for downtime?
sharjeel 15y ago
Facebook made exactly the same mistake and I believe it is hurting their platform a lot even though they've opened new doors to support new ideas for their evolved API. I launched an app back in May 2007 right after their platform launch. After the four years the app is quite broken now and every now and then a user sends me a message about it. Today I decided to spend a day to translate all those "old" API calls into "new & improvides" API calls but due to lack of documentation, unavailability of search results due to all that legacy documentation better SEO'ed and the hectic task of re-testing all the workflows I've previously tested thoroughly, I gave up! Why should I put in so much effort in re-writing my code just because you don't like a function name or you think same functionality could be achieved by another one so this should be dropped?

463 points by bauchidgw 15y ago

I can't state this enough. Building your company which heavily relies on an API provided by someone else is risky business. Why are we still in this infatuation stage of ignoring the pitfalls of this?

raganwald 15y ago
This shit still happens?? and people fall for it?! http://raganwald.posterous.com/this-shit-still-happens-and-people-fall-for-i http://raganwald.posterous.com/this-shit-still-happens-and-p...
qq66 15y ago
I think relying on a free API is the problem, not any API. When you pay per request for access to an API, at a level that can make the provider as well as you profitable, you can have some comfort in the fact that if your provider goes down there will likely be a competitor to spring up in its place.
- saraid216 15y ago
  It depends on how much of your revenue is based off access to the API. Every moment without access is lost revenue; that can break a startup. If your startup could survive if you switched off the API, then you're fine.
- lurker19 15y ago
  As long as you are willing to wait 5 or 10 years for someone to replicate Google's R&D.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I think you can state this in a different way, "Why would I invest in a company which will be killed by Google changing its mind about an API?" I imagine (but it's pure speculation) that folks like YC, other Angels, or early stage VC's should as their due diligence point out this risk and without a reasonable mitigation option pass on funding. This would 'self correct' folks who weren't doing the extra work. However for things where there isn't really a credible way to come up with an alternative you are kind of screwed. But then it would become a Google problem if they didn't get API adoption without offering some sort of indemnification in the event they need to take it back. I presume the 'translation abuse' is people using it to send spam in 141 different languages.
- pfhayes 15y ago
  If the abuse is translating spam, then that's even more surprising - because that's exactly the kind of abuse that Gmail already prevents all the time. It even seems like a great opportunity for Google to gather spam data in all sorts of languages.
kenjackson 15y ago
Actually this is even more specific, which is building your product on a webservice provided by someone else is risky. Unlike a library you download, a webservice ends the day they cut access to it. With a library you can continue to use it, and slowly rebuild your product to use a different library (or even use that library forever if it works for you), but with a web service it works 100% today and tomorrow it doesn't work at all.
chc 15y ago
You mean like .NET? Or Cocoa Touch? Or DOM? Or Node? Or POSIX? At some point, we're all relying on APIs provided by somebody else. I think that's why it's so easy for people to ignore the pitfalls of just a little bit more.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  The difference is that those APIs are "non-cloud". The code necessary to run those APIs is spread far and wide and no one can just centrally "turn off" .NET or POSIX. Perhaps over time the programs written for unmaintained APIs will fail on newer platforms, but you will always have the means to go back to the old system and run your dependent programs there. In Google's web-based system, Google is the only one with the keys necessary to keep that engine running, and if they take their ball and go home, all of that API's users are screwed.
- eli 15y ago
  If Microsoft stopped all .NET support today, my .NET apps will still keep running. Big difference.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- GoodIntentions 15y ago
  umm, no one can shut down POSIX. not really a comparison.
- kevinpet 15y ago
  In this case, people are using "API" to refer to the service. The google translate service is being shut down for non-human users.
tybris 15y ago
There are billion dollar companies like NetFlix completely reliant on AWS APIs.
- billswift 15y ago
  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.
  - tybris 15y ago
    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.
    - lurker19 15y ago
      Netflix is actually pretty well known for its resiliency to AWS outages.

DanI-S 15y ago

The original post mentions a 3-year deprecation period. Given the speed of technological progression, that would be pretty difficult for me to complain about. Edit: The Translate API, specifically mentioned, will be deprecated December 2011. That's pretty soon.

thetrumanshow 15y ago

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!

rcfox 15y ago
That's silly. They wouldn't develop something with the plan of cancelling it.
- kelnos 15y ago
  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.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    Most of the APIs are going to be up for 3 more years, the only one you can possibly complain about is the Translate API.
SriniK 15y ago
Google is doing the right thing that would be typical for an internet company. For any product they would need to have maintainers/owners who are continuously updating and monitoring. It is completely waste of time to maintain unused stuff.
- alanh 15y ago
  You are making a false assumption. I personally use the FeedBurner API to keep track of feed subscribers, for example, and it was deprecated yesterday.

Gunther 15y ago

I would be very interested in seeing how many developers would pay for the Translate API if Google had decided to monetize it instead of deprecating it then shutting it down as some of the commentors on the blog had suggested. At the same time if the Google Translate API is such a popular service then maybe there is enough demand to support a startup providing a Translate API ;)

drndown2008 15y ago
I would pay for what I use which isn't a whole lot, but it will be hard to find a programmable replacement like the Translate API. It's also a little hard to believe that it was a "financial burden" for one of the richest corporations in the world.
- frisco 15y ago
  It's also a little hard to believe that it was a "financial burden" for one of the richest corporations in the world. I think you underestimate the computational resources required here.
  - GoodIntentions 15y ago
    They have something like 37 Billion dollars in retained earning and don't pay a dividend. They didn't get that mountain of cash by losing money on things. Assure yourself, if you are using a free google-anything, somehow or other, it adds to their income.
cschep 15y ago
I was thinking exactly this.. is this basically a list of already vetted startup ideas? There is clearly demand!
frisco 15y ago
Starting a startup to replace Google Translate wouldn't be a simple proposition. Google's translation algorithms are considered best-of-breed and involve highly sophisticated statistical machine learning trained over a significant portion of their web crawl corpus data. Their staff scientists and engineers working on Translate are some of the best in the field, and the complexity here should not be underestimated. That said: yes, there's very obviously an opportunity here for the right team; but that opportunity is so big, its been there this entire time, even with the Google Translate API around.

wccrawford 15y ago

You 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 reliable API (read: paid for) afterwards.

tybris 15y ago
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.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  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 they are really really bad at, in case you haven't noticed). So the point is they use the API internally, exposing it gives them additional testing and additional feedback on how to make it better. Once the cost incurred by offering it for free exceeeds the benefits of the testing they pull it back. Continuing to use the now 'well tested and well rounded' API internally. GOOG-411 was a great example of this. It was a great way to get voice samples from a lot of people by bartering a service. Once their voice training parameters weren't getting better they turn off the service, (cuts costs) but they still get the durable benefit of a well trained voice recognition library.
  - nasmorn 15y ago
    Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest.
    - 15y ago

dstein 15y ago

It's really too bad. The Translate API was super, super fun to play with. I made myself a cute little interface to translate JavaScript or CSV arrays into multiple languages simultaneously. I envisioned being able to build fully self-translating web applications. And there's no other company providing this type of technology in this fashion. If there's any startup working in this area, here's your chance.

cookiecaper 15y ago
Agreed. This is a great opportunity for a startup to swoop in, clone the Google API so the only change necessary is authentication tokens and URI, and get everyone to switch to their (paid) platform.
- jan_g 15y ago
  It's hard for a startup to "swoop in", because Google uses statistical analysis in it's translation software if I understand correctly various articles about this topic. This means that they have thousands of correctly translated documents from which the software learns. And (so they say) it gets better and better with time, because they feed it more and more documents in various languages. I'm sure I've overly simplified the Google's implementation and there's a lot more to it, but I'm trying to make a point :) In short, it takes considerable amount of resources to make it work on a Google translate level.
  - cookiecaper 15y ago
    Sure, but a business that depends on this functionality would probably take "somewhat worse translation quality" over "completely dead translation capability". As the startup gets funding and customers, they can focus on performing the same kind of analysis and focusing specifically on translation, instead of the buckshot approach taken by Google. I am completely confident that a startup staffed with talented people can match Google Translate's quality in a reasonable amount of development time, and in the meantime, something is better than nothing.

jcampbell1 15y ago

Google cites abuse as the reason for shutting down the translate API. I find it ironic that they have engineers smart enough to write software that can translate human language between hundreds of language pairs, but can't write software to stop abuse. I'll let Google in on a little secret: If you charge more for a service than it costs you to provide, then there is no such thing as abuse.

code_duck 15y ago
Well, maybe not just that type of abuse, overusage without benefit to Google. Of course there could still be abuse of some sort, like somehow using a service to spread spam or malware.
- BlazingFrog 15y ago
  Somehow I doubt that's the abuse they are concerned about.
  - code_duck 15y ago
    Not in this case, but I don't think they consider spam and malware to be welcome. What I mean to say is that even profitable services can be abused, though if we want to choose a more specific word than 'abuse', the point may be moot.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
The cost in goodwill (and perhaps even real money) of using translate to fill hundreds/thousands of google ad-filled spam sites in hundreds of different languages may be much higher than they could ever conceivably recoup in charging for the API. Once you charge more than any legitimate user would be willing to pay for the API, you are effectively shutting down the API anyway.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  Are spammers going to be willing to pay x cents/call just to fill spam pages with translations? We must make x high enough that spammers will not make enough profit to justify the expense but legitimate businesses that depend on the API will still be able to pay for it. Spam is all about maximum distribution and massiveness, so I don't think the pricing would have to be very high to take the profitability out of the spam operations.

krisrak 15y ago

Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company.

mindcrime 15y ago
Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company. I think a better statement is "Never rely on anyone's API unless you have a contractual agreement and SLA in place, and a backup plan for if/when the API goes away; building something on an API otherwise is a mashup/side-project not a startup/company."
code_duck 15y ago
Pretty sure that's not what TweetDeck is thinking this week.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  But it's probably what all the other Twitter clients are thinking. :-)
  - code_duck 15y ago
    Doubtlessly. I hate being in the thrall of a company in such a way too. It's dangerous to be dependent upon someone else's their API. But is the chance of great success lower than for with other businesses? Probably better to start a Twitter client than a to-do list site or something.
gte910h 15y ago
All business is risk. This is yet one more risk. Hundreds if not thousands of successful businesses work on top of other businesses.
drcube 15y ago
Also, you shouldn't ever write a program with dependencies. :P

neovive 15y ago

The announcements seem impact the smaller, niche, API's. It's unlikely that this would ever happen to large API's such as Maps, Analytics, etc. However, the Translate API was definitely very cool.

taken11 15y ago
it happened for the search api

orblivion 15y ago

Google shuts down several of countless, FREE APIs, on which the foundations of many startups rest. "Google is just another company who doesn't care about developers." What? A little gratitude, at least, before suggesting how things could be better.

chc 15y ago
Gratitude for what? Ripping out "the foundations of many startups"? In many cases, offering something and then rescinding at the last minute is worse than not offering in the first place. (I'm not personally mad and wouldn't have built a business around this API. But creating false expectations is not a good thing.)
- orblivion 15y ago
  That's reasonable, but I think it's sortof unclassy to ignore the fact that they "cared" (as much as a company can really care) enough to offer it in the first place, and everything else they still offer. On the other hand I'm having mixed feelings now, trying to reconcile this with the way I feel about how Facebook's privacy policy affects users. I just don't get the impression that Google is careless the same way.
r00fus 15y ago
The problem is not that google is shutting down some of it's free APIs. Many folks are crying out for a paid version of the Translate API for example. I question the motive behind shuttering a useful and unparalleled API like translate without considering putting a pricetag on it.

michaelpinto 15y ago

Question: 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.

alienreborn 15y ago
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
Klonoar 15y ago
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/ 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/ 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: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
- michaelpinto 15y ago
  thank you!
- mromaine 15y ago
  Full disclosure: I'm the CTO of myGengo I would also add that because translation is core to our business, we would never deprecate the translation API :)

jsdalton 15y ago

I don't mean to be a stickler, but this is an egregious example of editorializing in the title. Can someone edit it please? I was already well aware of the API deprecation story, but I clicked on this link thinking it was a new article from Google defending the move (or something of the sort).

corin_ 15y ago
This submission is linking to a comment, not a news story, and that comment asks "why should any developer, any company which wants to build a valuable product for the long term use any of your APIs ever again?" So, still slightly editorialised title here on HN, but pretty much on the money.
- jsdalton 15y ago
  I totally missed that. Thank you for clarifying.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dkarl 15y ago
The post itself presents an opinion, not a news item, and the title reflects the content of the post.

tomkarlo 15y ago

Offering 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 companies simply not offer APIs?

dhimes 15y ago
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.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  I can understand being unhappy because they've decided to deprecate a free API. I disagree with the rage of the OP. This was a free service and they're no longer going to offer it, and they're shutting it down in an orderly manner. That's not selfish. This is more like someone giving you a birthday present every year, and then when they fail to send you one, you write a nasty post about how greedy and selfish they are.
  - wolfhumble 15y ago
    Yes I agree, one should always be grateful! I think it is difficult to compare this to a birthday present you did not receive, though. It is more like they want you to throw away the birthday present you got last year; a present you were grateful for and that now plays an important part in your daily routine.
    - dhimes 15y ago
      Exactly. Would you accept the next gift? Especially when giving the gift isn't a selfless act-- it's only given if it benefits the giver. I don't use their APIs, and am not building a business on anybody else's platform, so it doesn't affect me personally. But if I were doing that, this would make me change my mind.

ankimal 15y ago

Dint Fred Wilson say this at Disrupt NY last week: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit... They should charge for it at the very least. Whats stopping anyone from using a proxy service and hitting their web page? I m sure people would rather pay a little than go through these unnecessarily complicated and unethical practices.

nekitamo 15y ago

Glad I stuck to scraping Google Translate, and not using the API. Cheaper and a better long-term solution.

dstein 15y ago
What did you use instead?
- akanet 15y ago
  He said he scrapes the HTML output of the actual Google Translate web pages.

nhebb 15y ago

The 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.

anorwell 15y ago

How frustrating. I built something just last week using the translate, transliterate, and diacritize APIs. These are/were really useful APIs for creating language tools.

jdvolz 15y ago

I'm leery of building anything on top of someone else's API. I built on top of an API while also keeping in active contact with the company to let them know what I was doing, going as far as talking directly to their legal department, and they still shut me down when they couldn't handle the volume of usage. And this is in a situation where every marginal use of their API made them money. Collectively I was going to make them revenue of (projected admittedly) $1.2M. Didn't stop them from shutting me down. Long story short: Building on someone else's API is a recipe for disaster. Are there times when you have to? Sure. But you need to know what you are getting into.

ojilles 15y ago

FTA: "... so you decided to "das kind mit dem bade ausschuetten" (translate it) ?" Classic :-)

baconner 15y ago

Amazing sense of entitlement in this comment. Google built the apis, they host the apis, they incur costs from this yet provide them for free. Presumably this is because they intend to get some benefit. So its Google's decision if they want to continue to provide them or change the way they work. I use some free apis in my commercial apps but I'm aware that I don't control them nor am I entitled to them. They may change in such a way that I'd have to discontinue a product but that's a responsibility I took on when I decided to use them. Google and other free API providers don't bear reposibility for my decision.

pettazz 15y ago
Came here to say this. This guy is complaining because Google is shutting down a service that started to become more of a burden on them to provide than a benefit to the actual developers using it. They're not the goddamned Red Cross, they're a business. A very cool, developer-friendly business, yes, but still.

alanh 15y ago

Given they are deprecating the FeedBurner APIs, is there a good alternative to FeedBurner at this point?

magicalist 15y ago

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 actually pay per translate (and if you would, it's likely you could work out a license deal independent of a public API anyway). It seems like the reaction to this has more to do with annoyance that another cool free service is going away and remaining anger over app engine pricing changes.

jcampbell1 15y ago
Yes. I hire many translators. We use google translate, and license professional dictionaries to speedup the process. I estimate that Google translate saves us $20k/year. I personally would be willing to pay a lot for continued access to the translate API. (I'll probably just end up using some sort of iframe hackery when the translate API goes away) The actual business is http://www.yabla.com/ http://www.yabla.com/
- xpaulbettsx 15y ago
  Check out http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ - I find the translations aren't always as good with idiomatic phrases, but it does a pretty good job and the API is complete and easy to use.
- dirtyaura 15y ago
  Yabla seems very interesting. Care to share more details? How is it doing, who and where from are the largest user groups, how did you end up with the idea, etc.
jonnycat 15y ago
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.

rbranson 15y ago

If they feel as if they can only launch APIs that have indefinite lifetimes, this will seriously hamper their ability to justify building new public APIs. Deprecation is a risk taken anytime software is built on an API, for-profit or not. This is why software should be characterized as "living" and not a static entity.

modernerd 15y ago

Sad to see the Translate API go. Will be interesting to see if crowdsourced translation engines such as http://duolingo.com/ http://duolingo.com/ will one day come to fill Google Translate's shoes.

krisrak 15y ago

Fred Wilson said it the best at TechCrunch Disrupt, - "Don't be a Twitter bitch, Google bitch or facebook bitch. Be your own bitch"

smackfu 15y ago

Are these APIs really so unique that they can't code for some other provider's replacement? Is it just that a for-pay translation API, for instance, is too expensive for a product without a solid business plan to use?

AashayDesai 15y ago
And what of open-source projects that rely on such APIs? Are they expected to figure out a way to switch to for-pay APIs as well? Example: https://github.com/Marak/translate.js https://github.com/Marak/translate.js

rachelbythebay 15y ago

There are two kinds of APIs: the ones which are deprecated and the ones which don't exist or work yet.

frytaz 15y ago

booo! where's api replacement ?

whtswthelogin 15y ago

Google admits it doesn't know sh!t about running a stable business. Thanks Google! Ya dumb fvcks.

toddh 15y ago

My guess is Google setup these APIs to help train their learning algorithms. Now that they are trained there's no reason to keep up the service anymore. Maybe the key is to stay away from APIs that do work and don't contribute to revenue?

rryan 15y ago
For e.g. the translate API, how could they train their algorithms? There is no feedback associated with it (that I know of).
- toddh 15y ago
  GOOG-411 is an example of this process. Google got voice samples and users got a service. When the voice training parameters stopped getting better the service was shut off.
- chris-hexx 15y ago
  Static analysis of lots of human translators' output. Given the input and output of a strange human filter, they're trying to approximate the filter using machine learning. When their algorithm's output approximates the best translations, they're done.
  - rryan 15y ago
    That's one way to train a translation system, but that's not related to the Translate API -- I'm asking, what benefit does Google receive from usage of the API? They already have the entire Internet in their index -- it's not like they need a better source of what phrases exist. The parent implied that Google was using the API to train their MT systems, which I find hard to believe.

senthilnayagam 15y ago

Google aura is gone, without free let us see how it competes with apple, micrsoft

invisible 15y ago

Solution that they chose not to use: API keys. Really messed up of them to jump to completely shutting down without giving some sort of rate limit/access control.

lalmalang 15y ago

Far more likely than 'abuse' (they could have just charged afterall) is probably Google's realization that they have an uncontested lead in machine translation - and there is a lot of money to be made here.. They recently won a contract with the European patent office to machine translate patents for them...

johnx123 15y ago

Why this FUD? Let's scrap or sniff Google tools as before!

iqster 15y ago

Quote from Fred Wilson at TC Disrupt NY: Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch. (link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit... http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...)

adulau 15y ago

Some of the Google API are released early to get contributions, testers and inputs to improve their services. In other words, they abuse their contributors to improve their services without thanking them or helping them on the long-term. The translation service is one of them, the massive improvement of the translation service came from the many inputs received by people using their API. It shows again the importance of building free software along with their free network services. That's quite challenging and difficult but it shows that initiative like http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/ http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/ is not completely useless on the long run.

hessenwolf 15y ago

Hotmail deleted my account after 28 days and i lost contact with all the people i met in my year of travelling. Yahoo killed their spell checking api in april and now i need a new word splitter. Any ideas?

mmccomb 15y ago

Pruning old APIs wouldn't put me off. What puts me off is the inter-dependencies between APIs. Want to use Google Prediction API? Well you'll need a Google Storage API account for that. Oh and, you can only have one of those for free. And just in case, they'll take your billing info. I was psyched to start playing around with the prediction API but just got totally put off by the new API pricing/management. I'd argue that the restrictions are now so tight and cumbersome that there's no real sandbox environment to encourage devs to try out the services. I'm a touch disappointed.

latj 15y ago

Google was ok giving you a connection to translate because you were helping them build up the system. Now the most powerful database of human language is going to be locked up. We should all learn a lesson from this...

rryan 15y ago
How does using the translate API help Google? They already have the largest source of natural language text in existence (the web) -- why would they need your translation queries?

pnathan 15y ago

Why should anyone build a business on an API that there isn't a contract in place to require uptime, with appropriate fiscal penalties for downtime?

sharjeel 15y ago

Facebook made exactly the same mistake and I believe it is hurting their platform a lot even though they've opened new doors to support new ideas for their evolved API. I launched an app back in May 2007 right after their platform launch. After the four years the app is quite broken now and every now and then a user sends me a message about it. Today I decided to spend a day to translate all those "old" API calls into "new & improvides" API calls but due to lack of documentation, unavailability of search results due to all that legacy documentation better SEO'ed and the hectic task of re-testing all the workflows I've previously tested thoroughly, I gave up! Why should I put in so much effort in re-writing my code just because you don't like a function name or you think same functionality could be achieved by another one so this should be dropped?