Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

You mean, why should you build a for-profit product while relying on someone else's not-for-profit API?<p>I'm guessing you shouldn't!<p>I've seen a lot of neat projects come from Google APIs, but that's as far as I'd taking it.<p>Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>Edit: The Translate API, specifically mentioned, will be deprecated December 2011. That's pretty soon.

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

I don't mean to be a stickler, but this is an egregious example of editorializing in the title. Can someone edit it please?<p>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).

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.<p>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.

Google has made some unpopular developer-facing moves lately (App Engine pricing changes come to mind), and it seems entirely out-of-character.<p>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!

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.<p>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.<p>Would the OP prefer that Google and other companies simply not offer APIs?

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 ;)

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.

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 <i>actual</i> business that will be affected by this change?<p>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).<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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

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.<p>If there's any startup working in this area, here's your chance.

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

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.

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.

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

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.<p>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 <a href="http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/" rel="nofollow">http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/</a> is not completely useless on the long run.

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

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

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.

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 <i>lot</i> of money to be made here.. They recently won a contract with the European patent office to machine translate patents for them...

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.<p>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 &#38; 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!<p>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?

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?

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.<p>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.

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.

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.

Dint Fred Wilson say this at Disrupt NY last week: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...</a><p>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 <i>unethical</i> practices.

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

Sad to see the Translate API go. Will be interesting to see if crowdsourced translation engines such as <a href="http://duolingo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://duolingo.com/</a> will one day come to fill Google Translate's shoes.

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...

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

booo! where's api replacement ?

Google admits it doesn't know <i>sh!t</i> about running a stable business.<p>Thanks Google! Ya dumb fvcks.