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Comment by thetrumanshow | Hacker News Reader

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

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!

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I agree, something strange is definitely going on internally at Google.

I actually attribute it to starting with the shutdown of Wave and the floundering about with Buzz and other products since then.

One thing that Google has been excellent at doing is building up the perception that they have near limitless computing power at their disposal. These kinds of shutdowns, and the reasons given, are doing immense harm to that cultivated image.

Computing power, sure, but who's running it?

Google seems to be really good at starting projects and really bad at stopping them.

That's silly. They wouldn't develop something with the plan of cancelling it.

Why not? Roll something out, and say you'll commit to providing it for a certain amount of time. If, after that time, it doesn't seem worth it to keep it going (by any metric you decide), pull it. You've given fair warning.

Of course, I imagine that sort of thing would hurt adoption quite a bit.

Most of the APIs are going to be up for 3 more years, the only one you can possibly complain about is the Translate API.

Google is doing the right thing that would be typical for an internet company. For any product they would need to have maintainers/owners who are continuously updating and monitoring. It is completely waste of time to maintain unused stuff.

You are making a false assumption. I personally use the FeedBurner API to keep track of feed subscribers, for example, and it was deprecated yesterday.

....and you still have 3 years to use it! (granted no more development will be done on the API.) So over the next three years which is like an eon in web years you can look for an alternative. Frankly Goolge might even bring out an alternative.

Eh, don’t forget that migrating users from one feed to another would be a huge pain in the ass.

Yes, and it is deprecated, not shutdown: "we have no current plans to remove existing functionality".

Fair point, but isn’t that basically what deprecation is? A communication that something will likely stop working at some point?

Yes, so you may have to spend some of that money you have not been paying Google for Feedburner, and use it to build or buy a replacement.

Not always, it might also mean they moved it into maintenance mode.

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