Behavior, Content, Money – 3 Things you should never give away for free!!!

BCmoney MobileTV

More victims in the Google API Graveyard

Posted by bryan on May 31, 2011 in E-Business, E-Commerce, Web Services with 8 Comments


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Google Appliance as shown at RSA Expo 2008 in ...

Image via Wikipedia

On May 26th, Google announced the deprecation and/or shutdown of many of their most popular and widely developed against APIs, leaving many developers and even Google fanboys feeling dumbfounded, betrayed or at the very least neglected.

According to Google, the following APIs are now deprecated but have no scheduled shutdown date:

  1. Code Search API
  2. Diacritize API
  3. Feedburner APIs
  4. Finance API
  5. Power Meter API
  6. Sidewiki API
  7. Wave API
  8. Translate API (v2)

Meanwhile, the following APIs will be both deprecated and shut down (within 6-32 months):

  1. Blog Search API
  2. Books Data API
  3. Books JavaScript API (not new Books API)
  4. Image Search API
  5. News Search API
  6. Patent Search API
  7. Safe Browsing API (v1 only)
  8. Language API
  9. Translate API
  10. Transliterate API
  11. Virtual Keyboard API
  12. Video Search API
  13. Web Search API (deprecated since Nov.1st, 2010, not in this round)

Since most of the negative comments floating around the web are centered on the shocking loss of Google Translate, here are some possible Google Translate alternatives:
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Resurrecting the Google SOAP API

Posted by bcmoney on October 28, 2009 in AJAX, PHP, Web Services with 1 Comment


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Original Photo courtesy of Magicfantasy on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/manicfantasy/889984960/

I know what you’re thinking, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie right?

Well let me first start off by saying I am not a huge fan of SOAP or anything, in fact, I much prefer REST about 90% of the time. However, there are still some cases where a fully controllable SOAP API which simply lists results as XML wrapped in a SOAP envelope, is a better way of interacting with data; particularly when that data is updated less frequently and is larger in size. Seeing Google results as XML can make them easier to manipulate and exchange, oh and lets not forget, that XML is what the X in AJAX stands for anyway, though JSON is used interchangeably these days, if not more often. With the debate between the SOAP and RESTful crowd all but won by REST and its simplicity, lets go ahead and awake the sleeping dinosaur that is the Google Search SOAP API for experimentation’s sake. For a quick history lesson, in 2006 the headlines rang to the predictable tune of “Google Drops the SOAP“, which Google eventually responded to by effectively saying “move on” and former managers for Google’s SOAP APIs came out and explained Why SOAP sucks.

In choosing between web scrapping and using the new Search API, I’ve opted to go for the more advisable Search API approach. The wrapper code for the Google AJAX Search API was done in PHP, using a simple client/server implementation, and referring to an old archive of the SOAP API’s WSDL here:
http://bcmoney-mobiletv.com/widgets/google/GoogleSearch.wsdl (here’s a sample SOAP request)
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BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money

The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:

1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.

2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.

3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.

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