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Google Pulls Access To Unsupported But Popular Weather API

Posted by Unknown on from the we-did-it-because-we-love-you dept.

New submitter drsmack1 writes with news of some bummed out programmers losing access to an undocumented Google API. From the article: "The curious popularity of the Google Weather API appears to be coming to a close. The search giant never officially supported the feature, but developers have used the unofficial feed available from the iGoogle homepage. With iGoogle now set for deprecation in November, developers are reporting that the once simple weather API is no longer returning data." Seems like the sort of thing you could replace with a tiny bit of XSLT.

2 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wait, you're using an unsupported API... by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, yeah, there are plenty of alternatives. Just now I went to my igoogle page to see if the weather widget was still working. It was — because I use the NOAA widget, not Google's own widget.

    But you know, my igoogle page is going away in about a year. I can certainly live without it (I don't really need to a weather report and the Wikipedia Picture of the Day every time I open a browser tab, and now my daily agenda is also on my phone) but it's part of a trend that I'm really getting tired of. They invent some clever new application, then they get bored with it and pull it. They publish an intriguing new API, then they get bored with it and shut it off. The acquire some interesting new company, get bored with it and shut it down. And so on, over and over. Once or twice is a minor nuisance, but they do it constantly.

    Even when they stick with an application for the long haul, they take forever to get it out of beta mode, they tend to skimp on the boring little details that make for mature software (I mean you, Postini! And you Android Emulator!), and they never get round to providing proper documentation or tech support.

    I've said it before: I love Google for their creativity and their striving to create lots of cool products. But I wish to fuck they'd grow up already.

  2. Re:I wish Google would have warned us... by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've seen some ridiculous suggestions that Google has ignored it's motto, but this is the most ridiculous one I can remember at the moment.