At the Google I/O 2011, Google launched a total of seven new APIs. Today, Google have announced that, as a part of their “Spring Cleaning”, a few other APIs will be shut down. This is a really disappointing announcement, at least for the developers who use any of these ill-fated APIs. Google says that their APIs list is getting very big and, so, they have decide to shut down some old non-responsive APIs and those which have been replaced by better ones.
The APIs which are going to be shut as a part of ‘Spring Cleaning’ by Google are:
- Blog Search API
- Books Data API
- Image Search API
- News Search API
- Patent Search API
- Safe Browsing API (v1 only)
- Translate API
- Transliterate API
- Video Search API
- Virtual Keyboard API
Google will also deprecate a few APIs. They have not given a shutdown date for these APIs though. These APIs are:
- Code Search API
- Diacritize API
- Feedburner APIs
- Finance API
- Power Meter API
- Sidewiki API
- Wave API
Google Wave has not lived upto its hype and has been a failure. Google has officially stopped support for Wave last year. So, Google shutting down the Wave API is not a surprise.
The shutdown of the Translate API, though, is going to be painful for a lot of developers. This API is very popular and is considered very useful. The excuse that Google have given for shutting down the Translate API is that it has been officially deprecated due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse. I think that it is a lame excuse, don’t you? If the Translate API is giving Google an economic burden, they can charge for it instead of shutting it down.
Google has mentioned they will suggest alternatives for these APIs to developers so that they can achieve similar functionality – whether it’s pointing to a new version or to a related one. It also says that it has lengthy deprecation periods – as long as 3 years in some cases – in order to minimize the impact.
Source : GoogleCode Blog