
Google Shuts Down the Google Feed API - alanfranzoni
https://developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/announcing-turndown-of-google-feed-api.html
======
luso_brazilian
From [1]:

 _> What is the Google Feed API?_

 _> With the Feed API, you can download any public Atom, RSS, or Media RSS
feed using only JavaScript, so you can mash up feeds with your content and
other APIs with just a few lines of JavaScript. This makes it easy to quickly
integrate feeds on your website. _

"To quickly integrate feeds on your website".

The latest API deprecations and product removals (everywhere, not just at
google) are part of what I believe to be a growing trend to take away the
ability for the end users to be publishers and to bring them back to be
passive consumers (like in the old radio / TV days).

[1] [https://developers.google.com/feed/](https://developers.google.com/feed/)

~~~
Jaruzel
Is that all it does? I'm sure there are other services out there that do
exactly this. Does anyone know of any?

~~~
Turing_Machine
Writing a system that (correctly) interprets the zillion flavors of "RSS" out
there and presents them with a common API is non-trivial. An 80% solution is
pretty easy, and a 90% solution isn't that hard, but a near-100% solution will
take you into some very dark and ugly places.

I don't know of any service that does this as well as the Google Feed API did.
If someone else does, please share.

~~~
allendoerfer
Well, start the service, state you use RSS library X and that you will keep it
updated and send people over to it for bug reports and contributions.

------
cm3
I would only use a Google, Microsoft, _whoever_ API if I was paid for
integrating and maintaining it. I would never rely on such a thing in a
personal project/venture. Time and again paid and free web services are
getting shut down without a replacement. The reputation is already such that
nobody can trust a service to be there in 2 years. Another reason to build
more decentralized solutions while we can. I was delighted to read that
Berners-Lee and Cerf advocated just that recently.

~~~
Aissen
You mean like Parse was paid for ? It's not necessarily a silver bullet.

~~~
kowdermeister
Relying on third parties is never safe. I think these services are great for
fast prototyping, but eventually you should move on to build your own stuff.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I agree. We need a shift away from the whole SaaS idea. It plays nicely with
ultra-short-term market thinking, so people buy into that, but it is bad long-
term. Any service you use is giving away control to a third party. It's true
in life as well. Some services are easily replaceable - if the barber shop
next to you closes down, there's always another few streets away. But some
services are not so easily replaceable, and it's the case of most of them on-
line due to the very bad state of software-software integration (i.e. having
people to write complicated translation layers). If you depend on such
services for your business and they decide to shut down, you're screwed.

If we want to move computing forward, we need more _products_ and less
_services_. More software that one can download and host themselves.

~~~
kowdermeister
SaaS is not bad at all, but when it's misused.

Current example is ticketing. Two of my clients need a solution to manage
ticketing and subscribers. They went with Eventbrite, even tough it's a bit
expensive. It saves them tons of time and money. Sometimes it makes little
sense to develop such a system for somebody if they have 2 events / year.

Often, third parties are much better in quality, than an in-house dev could
create. I would only pick a third party service if it has many competitors, so
easily disposable.

I've been screwed by this before, I built on an API before and the legal team
shut down my API key for bullshit reason. 1 year of devtime went down the
drain :) Long story short, SaaS is bad for mission critical features,
otherwise great helpers on the short / mid run.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The distinction of core/critical and non-critical aspects of your business is
a good one. I'm not saying "don't use SaaS at all" (even though I dislike the
world of short-lived, data-siphoning services we've created). But betting the
life of your business on a third-party service makes sense only if the
expected life of your business is shorter than the expected life of the
service you want to use. And I think we could all use more longer-living
solutions.

~~~
Godel_unicode
To quote Joel Spolsky "If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no
matter what"

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html)

------
onion2k
Google need to learn that providing a free service and then retracting it is
quite damaging to their reputation. I know _many_ developers who are
incredibly reluctant to build on Google APIs because the danger of them being
shut down feels high.

 _However, interest and use of the API has waned over time, and it is running
on API infrastructure that is now two generations old at Google._

I wonder if there's a correlation between the downturn in interest in RSS and
Google Reader being closed.

~~~
spriggan3
> I wonder if there's a correlation between the downturn in interest in RSS
> and Google Reader being closed.

Google Reader was a great app, I didn't believe Google one second when they
basically said that nobody used it anymore.

RSS is still the best way for me, personally, to get my news from the internet
on a whole range of subjects. I don't like Twitter or Facebook which are
mostly noise and spam. With RSS I get my news right from the source, without a
third party.

I also use RSS in APIs I write for pub-sub endpoints.

Google could have integrated RSS in Gmail for instance,the same way they
integrated a chat inside the email client. They didn't because they don't
believe in open tech that much anymore. It's all about messaging apps with
proprietary protocols these days. Yet RSS is part of the web.

~~~
eru
Reader user base wasn't really growing (in terms that Google is used to).

But more importantly, the technology was creaking, and nobody at Google wanted
to maintain it.

(Disclaimer: I ended up working for the team that shut down Reader.)

------
Animats
As I pointed out last time, RSS for real news is doing fine. RSS for social
crap is dead.

Space News has an RSS feed.[2] The Senate Democrats have an RSS feed covering
what's happening on the Senate floor.[3] (The GOP discontinued their feed.[4])
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has a feed with markup in embedded
JSON.[5] Not sure what's going on there. Even The Hollywood Reporter has an
RSS feed.[6]

So for real news, RSS is in good shape. RSS seems to be doing fine for sources
that have something important to say.

[1]
[http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews](http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews)
[2] [http://spacenews.com/feed/](http://spacenews.com/feed/) [3]
[https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/](https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/) [4]
[http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php](http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php) [5]
[https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1](https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1)
[6]
[http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news](http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news)

------
robocaptain
Does anyone have a good replacement for this? I somehow missed the original
announcement and am now realizing that I'm one of those (apparently few)
people who actually does use the API.

~~~
reubano
See my comment above [1]. Also view a list of alternatives here [2 - 4].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016815)

[2] [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/12-best-yahoo-pipes-
alternative...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/12-best-yahoo-pipes-alternatives-
look/)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9662035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9662035)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667004)

------
nabla9
Google is throwing new API's without commitment and trying to find if one of
them becomes popular. This is good way to limit the risk.

Developers wait to see if Google commits to API before fully adopting it. This
is good way to limit the risk.

~~~
pc86
Don't you end up with a catch 22 where developers won't write apps against an
API because it may disappear, and Google gets rid of an API because nobody is
writing apps against it?

~~~
hegivor
I'm pretty sure that is the point nabla9 is making.

------
spriggan3
Is there any alternative API ? This one was quite handy for RSS feed
discovery.

~~~
reubano
See my comment above [1]. Also view a list of alternatives here [2 - 4].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016815)

[2] [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/12-best-yahoo-pipes-
alternative...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/12-best-yahoo-pipes-alternatives-
look/)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9662035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9662035)

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667004)

------
bhaak
I'm confused about the use case of the Google Feed API.

It let's you download a feed by Javascript. But why is this a web service?

Is there no Javascript framework that does the same without having to
roundtrip to an external service?

~~~
deno
They also stored longer history for feeds than what you get by fetching it
yourself.

[https://developers.google.com/feed/v1/reference#includeHisto...](https://developers.google.com/feed/v1/reference#includeHistoricalEntries)

------
johnnyo
Google really hates RSS, don't they?

They seem to be actively killing anything that they have that once supported
it

~~~
sp8
I know, I'm just waiting for the day they announce the shutdown of FeedBurner.
That's going to create a LOT of broken feeds if they do...

------
coldcode
They need to make a Google Shuts Down ___ API. Every time you call it,
something else gets shut down.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think we need to make a SV Drinking Game.

You drink one whenever Google shuts down an API or a service.

You drink one whenever someone says we're in a bubble.

You drink one whenever Techcrunch writes another X is Uber/AirBnB for Y
article.

You drink two whenever we get another unicorn.

etc.

------
julien
Not too late to consider a switch to Superfeedr
[https://blog.superfeedr.com/google-feeds-api-
welcome/](https://blog.superfeedr.com/google-feeds-api-welcome/)

------
wineisfine
Google, making the web less transparent one day at a time. And meanwhile they
complain Facebook is eating the open web, while they're dismantling it
themselves

~~~
TeMPOraL
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? I.e. we wouldn't care about Google shutting down
another useful product if we weren't allowing ourselves to be dependent on it
in the first place.

