onfocus

The O'Reilly Radar picked up on an internal conversation I was involved with about Google's decision to stop supporting their Search API. There's more at the Radar: Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API.

I can't help but think of the lawyerly phrase arbitrary and capricious to describe the decision because no one from Google has explained the move in a public forum. I'm sure there were some black hat SEO types using the Search API for nefarious purposes—and I'm guessing the decision to shut it down stems in part from that. (Not to mention that SOAP has fallen out of favor.) But that's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why such a limited alternative? (The API has been "replaced" by the Ajax API, a very limited cousin of the Search API.) And why not move to a REST API if that's where the developer preference winds have blown? In one of my emails I mentioned that this decision reminds me of Microsoft's decision to scrap their MVP program (which was later reinstated). Why alienate future potential power users?

Also, the new Hackzine blog picked up a tip I stumbled on for grabbing an API Key while the grabbing is good: Get a Google SOAP API Key.

Update: Slashdot weighs in. For them it's all about the failure of SOAP, not a misstep by Google.

A few years ago I put together a little tool to help assemble RSS feeds of Amazon products called the Amazon RSS Feed-Builder. I've been using feeds generated with this tool for about three years, tracking the latest books, music, and DVDs across series and artists that I like. Because publishers often announce books to Amazon well in advance, I know about new books in the Hacks Series well before O'Reilly announces the books on their own website. Amazon also offers pre-built feeds on their Amazon Syndication page.

These old-style Amazon feeds have worked well at alerting me about new products, but they are fairly limited. I just see the title, the author, and a price in my newsreader. I decided to upgrade my Amazon feeds so each item includes a product image (if available), a product description, and product details. And I figured if I was going to go through the trouble of upgrading my feeds, why not just upgrade the Amazon RSS Feed-Builder? So here's the new thing:

Amazon Feed Generator

It's hot off the assembly line today, and I'm sure there are bugs to be worked out. (It's also powered by orange gradients.) If you want to give it a shot, feel free to try it out and post any comments/problems on this post. As an example, here are the latest books in a Polar Exploration Feed. I subscribe to this feed, and I'm notified whenever new books about polar exploration show up in Amazon's catalog.

This uses the latest version of Amazon Web Services, with a custom stylesheet and Amazon's server-side XSLT service. And I want to say thanks to Alan Taylor for his recent article subtitled, AMZN-XSLT-JSON-AJAX (AXJA?). His stylesheet is a perfect example of consuming the new, more-complex AWS responses with XSL.

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the new Yahoo! Web Services API. I wrote some thoughts and a quick tour of the API for O'Reilly Network: Yahoo! Web Services.

I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with all of that search data—images, local listings, news, video, and (of course) web. But before you tear off and write your own Yahoo! applications, just make sure you're not going to use Yahoo! Web Services to "operate nuclear facilities" as it's prohibited by their terms of use. I know most people don't read those things, so I figured it would be good to point out. But don't let that limitation stop you. There are plenty of other less-obvious uses for Yahoo! Web Services that are even more compelling. ;)

Here's the official scoop from the Yahoo! Search Blog: Announcing the Yahoo! Search Developer Network and Search Web Services

MIT Technology Review has an article about Amazon Web Services up: Amazon: Giving Away the Store. I talked with the author—Wade Roush—a while back, and he mentioned some of my comments in the article. He provides a good overview of why Web Services are important for non-techies, and I really like Wade's summary of Amazon's Web Services/syndication strategy:

[Amazon] has, in essence, outsourced much of its R&D, and a growing portion of its actual sales, to an army of thousands of software developers, who apparently enjoy nothing more than finding creative new ways to give Web surfers access to Amazon merchandise—and earning a few bucks in the process. The result: a syndicate of mini-Amazons operating at very little cost to Amazon itself and capturing customers who might otherwise have gone elsewhere.

I mentioned something about Amazon's Web Services strategy being "almost frightening." I think that's becuase I've primarily worked at and with small companies. So when I see what's possible when a large organization decides to pour resources into a project, I'm impressed by what can be accomplished. It's funny to see comments I made in what I viewed as a conversation with someone end up in print, because the quotes feel out of context. (Though I don't think the quotes are distorted or misused here in any way.)

An article I wrote for O'Reilly Network is up: Hacking Books with Safari Web Services. You can get book catalog info via Amazon's API, but Safari's API is the first to make some of the contents of books available to developers. The article is about creating RSS feeds with the Safari API to track what offline books are saying about specific technologies.