Chaos Magnet

Google discontinues SOAP API

I'm absolutely stunned, if a little late to the party. After almost single-handedly making it obvious why Web services are a good thing and providing who knows how many programmers with their first experience with SOAP, Google has discontinued support for the SOAP API that fuels who knows how many applications. Yes, there are alternatives, and I will cover them in a future post, but this warrants commentary.

If you already have a key, you can continue to use the API, but for how long? And since you can't give out your key, and they're not giving out any new ones, it means that only you can use your application. Unless it's on a web site, of course.

But those web sites seem to be the only place that Google has considered. The replacement is their AJAX API, which is, quite frankly, useless for anything but displaying results in the browser. Although it would be a straightforward technical process to extract the data from this API and use it in the same way that you used the SOAP data, it is not just explicitly forbidden in the terms of use, is referred to in the FAQ as something that will specifically get your application banned.

My mind is reeling with what this is going to do to the Web services ecosystem. Sure, most Web services applications don't use it, but I would venture to say that most of us programming the stuff started out learning on the Google API. Were we supposed to do now, switch over to the Microsoft Live API? Or is this supposed to be a way of promoting REST?

Yahoo has a REST-based API that is still functioning, presumably for the long term, but who the heck knows at this point?

To be fair, Google has always said that the service was "beta", and it has never really been officially supported, and that it might be discontinued at any time. But, come on, they certainly can't have failed to notice its popularity.

I have seen several theories on this. One mentions that many of the applications built on this technology have been Search Engine Optimization applications, many of which are commercial applications and people have been making money. One mentions the fact that by forcing people to use the Ajax API, they will be able to shoehorn in both ads and paid results. Both of these are probably true.

But these are not the only uses for which this API was suited. The inability to get at the actual data using the Ajax API means that Google data can no longer be included in mashups. (Yes, I understand that if you already have an application, you can continue to use it. I'm talking about new applications going forward.) The API can no longer be used to research information. You can no longer use it for trending. You can no longer use it for data mining.

I make my living telling people how to do things. I'm good at it. Very good at it. But I spent a lot of my time thinking about uses for these technologies so I can explain why it's important for people to learn them. For Google to pull the rug out like this makes me physically ill.

I feel like entire avenues of progress have been cut off by the loss of this capability. Will other search providers follow Google's lead and lock up their data? After all, if darling Google can do it, why can't everybody else?

You may think that I'm overreacting here, and maybe I am, but you don't see what I see. And now, apparently, nobody else will either.

Technorati tags: Google | SOAP | REST | Web services | mashups | API | massive disappointment | future | stifling innovation |

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