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> App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on

> App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently. I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one). Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?

JS_startup 15y ago
Google's recent behavior was central in our decision not to embrace their technologies and APIs. If they're going to either be suddenly shut down or have prohibitive, anti-startup pricing applied to them then why should we hitch our wagon to their horse?
mikeryan 15y ago
Its not just independents, we're working with one of the largest US companies and they don't want to license (and by license I mean happy to pay for) google maps (for a traffic app) because the Goog can't guarantee that the maps will remain ad free.
killpg 15y ago
The real problem with G+ is that I forgot about it. Facebook nags you with emails every time something happens, but G+ just has a dropdown box that lets me approve friends or not from gmail, and I never see my "wall". If they made me go to the "wall" to approve friends, then I'd see what my few active G+ friends were posting and maybe post something back. I went months without seeing the wall, even though I have close friends who work at Google and post things I'd actually want to read. Also, the "circles" thing and their change of terminology seems like it's being different for the sake of being different, or to avoid being sued by Facebook or something. Stick to the terminology people know. G+ should have tried an "import Facebook" feature that takes all your pictures off Facebook and invites your friends to G+. This alone would help me not care about Facebook. I have a ton of pictures on Facebook that I'll never see again if I were to close my account. Facebook might try to block a feature like this, but it's sorely needed to make the transition. G+ is also a bad name.

JS_startup 15y ago

Google's recent behavior was central in our decision not to embrace their technologies and APIs. If they're going to either be suddenly shut down or have prohibitive, anti-startup pricing applied to them then why should we hitch our wagon to their horse?

mikeryan 15y ago

Its not just independents, we're working with one of the largest US companies and they don't want to license (and by license I mean happy to pay for) google maps (for a traffic app) because the Goog can't guarantee that the maps will remain ad free.

killpg 15y ago

The real problem with G+ is that I forgot about it. Facebook nags you with emails every time something happens, but G+ just has a dropdown box that lets me approve friends or not from gmail, and I never see my "wall". If they made me go to the "wall" to approve friends, then I'd see what my few active G+ friends were posting and maybe post something back. I went months without seeing the wall, even though I have close friends who work at Google and post things I'd actually want to read. Also, the "circles" thing and their change of terminology seems like it's being different for the sake of being different, or to avoid being sued by Facebook or something. Stick to the terminology people know. G+ should have tried an "import Facebook" feature that takes all your pictures off Facebook and invites your friends to G+. This alone would help me not care about Facebook. I have a ton of pictures on Facebook that I'll never see again if I were to close my account. Facebook might try to block a feature like this, but it's sorely needed to make the transition. G+ is also a bad name.