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Google Pulls Access To Unsupported But Popular Weather API
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.
Why didn't I think of that!
Sure: http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/
Reminds me of the punchline of the Steve Martin joke "How to become a millionaire and not pay taxes":
First, make a million dollars. Then, tell the IRS you forgot.
Going the extra mile and notifying the users would have undoubtedly made a good impression but this situation resembles someone grepping a website for QOTDs and then complaining that his regexp no longer works because the site's HTML code changed or the quotes were removed altogether. Bottom line is, tough luck. When something is not supported then it's not supported, how much clearer can you get?
Which part of "unsupported" did you not get?
why would anybody use these?
And then complaining when said API disappears? For the US at least NOAA offers a pretty nice REST/XML API that's free and even comes with icons you can link to if building a webpage or app.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
With iGoogle now set for deprecation in November
That's November 2013.
Is it asking too much of a company whose motto is "Don't be evil" to have given a week or two of warning or at least to have spent a minute or two setting up a meaningful and informative error page? Come on Google, you can do better...
And if it were a supported API it would have that, but it's pretty clearly not a supported API.
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=44.89640&lon=-93.61164939999998&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml an XML link as an example.
You can get it as KML as well whatever that is.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Beliving in global warming doesn't automatically make you a "fanatic." Stop being an asshole.
Which part of silently dropping undocumented and unsupported service is "being evil"? Now if the motto was "Be nice" that'd be something to expect and it would be on par with "Dear trespassers! Please note that you will have to find another shortcut as I'm fixing this hole in the fence next week. I apologize for inconvenience".
There's difference between deprecated andundocumented.
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.
that seemed to imply that the user had done something wrong
You did do something wrong. You used an unsupported API.
Are you saying that the weather data supplied from thousands of user across the world to Weather Underground is suspect because the whomever runs the site accepts the science behind anthropogenic climate change? How does that NOT make you the fanatic?
There is no such thing as "a tiny bit of XSLT".
Well, global warming is real, and we are fucked already, it is just a matter of how fucked we want to be, just somewhat, or really hard. Given how much is happening even in countries not as backwards as the US, I guess we want to be really fucked.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
And don't you think that the whole "self-entitlement" thing is getting overused?
You see, things that are free are still things that people do use and therefore it is an issue if the service is gone. If the gmail would be gone tomorrow for good without any warning, would you still repeat the same mantra? It is for free after all... except that a good portion of the business world relies on it beyond the personal "freerider" usage. Just because one runs a free service doesn't mean that one isn't responsible for the service.
Do you even try to research things on your own or just like to make up shit wearing that tin foil?
The desktop weather gadget uses msn services:
http://weather.service.msn.com/find.aspx?outputview=search&src=Windows7&weasearchstr=90210&weadegreetype=F&culture=en-US
Easily verified by watching traffic and changing your zip code
I can explain what happened.
I work for Weather Central in Madison, Wisconsin. In December we were purchased by the famously rich Rothschilds of Europe and they brought in a charismatic new superstar CEO. Seven months later, they cashed out to the tune of +$15 million, selling to our historical nemesis and competitor, Weather Services International.
WSI is owned by The Weather Channel Companies, which is an umbrella company for The Weather Channel (duh) as well as Weather Underground, which they recently bought. (TWCC is owned by NBC Universal, which is owned by Bain Capital and Blackstone Group. That means I now work for Mitt Romney.)
This consolidation is complete. Over 90% of the worldwide weather services business is now owned by TWCC, which used that considerable power to negotiate a contract with Google. The contract stipulates that TWCC (and their sub-companies) will provide data to Google, and in turn Google would eliminate its weather API, because TWCC has its own weather APIs (more than one of them now, in fact). The API at my company is cleverly named DataCloud: http://datacloud.wxc.com/?vs=0.9.
This consolidation is definitely good for TWCC, which will never again have to worry about competing in the marketplace. The monopoly will last until a disruptive technology displaces it in a couple decades, if it's anything like other stale monopolies. Unfortunately, it is definitely bad for the other 7.01 billion people on the planet, who now only have one source for weather data.