Tumblr Mangles Developer Relations
Last week I logged on to Tumblr and was confronted with this abomination:
Missing e notice from tumblr. Way to encourage API development, guys.
Needless to say, this is pretty disturbing, and I wonder what Tumblr is thinking by posting this.
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The Danger Of API Development: Making Something Too Good
On CNET, via slashdot: Lendle, a Web site that had helped facilitate the loaning of ebooks among Kindle users, was effectively destroyed when Amazon shut down Lendle’s access to its Kindle API.
Lendle first reported the news via Twitter: “Amazon has revoked Lendle’s API access. This is why the site is down. It’s sad and unfortunate that Amazon is shutting down lending sites…According to Amazon, Lendle does not ‘serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.’”
According to Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft, “at least two other Kindle lending services” have been terminated from the API.
The problem with Lendle and its cousins is simple: It was too good at what it did.
Amazon does allow one-time loans of an ebook for up to 14 days, but they expect such trading to be among intimates. Lendle greatly expanded the ability for one person to trade with a complete stranger, and as a result posed a serious threat to potential Kindle edition sales.
After all, if I can’t find someone to lend me an ebook, I probably have to buy it. Put me in big enough a room of Kindle owners, however, and I’m likely to find what I am after for free.
I don’t care to get into copyright, the nature of modern publishing, or the like. I’m far more interested in pointing out the problem with using third-party APIs that this illustrates: If you make something too good, there’s usually nothing stopping the API service from cutting you off and stealing your work.
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Hello, I’ve a question about your post “Using AJAX To Update A Non-Map DIV Via Google Maps API’s GDownload() And GMarker OnClick Event”. Your example is for the V2 version of google maps, so, is it possible to have exactly the same things for the v3 api?
I believe the objects and methods are the same between the two versions of the API, so the answer is probably. Unless, of course, they objects and / or methods have changed. In which case, no.
Update To The YOURLS – Twitter – Google Reader Script
I recently blogged, Using YOURLS And The Twitter API With Google Reader’s Custom SendTo Link. Since then, I have made a few improvements to the script, mostly in the error-trapping line.
- I broke out the variables for the YOURLS API signature, plus the Twitter API consumer key, consumer secret, access key and access secret, and converted them to constants.
- I removed urldecode() from the formation of the YOURLS API request. It’s not necessary.
- I have added code to trap any errors in when making the short URL.
- I am now getting the statusCode and message node contents, in case something goes wrong with the shortening.
- I set the script to die on a URL shortening error, which is determined by the short URL being an empty string or the statusCode node having a value other than 200.
- The code, coupled with the message, should explain any problems adequately enough to debug shortening issues. If you find you are getting zero-length responses from your URL shortening, that’s probably due to a server misconfiguration; possibly from bad mod_rewrite rules, possibly due to a messed-up cookie on your PC.
- I strip HTML tags from the title.
- I discovered today that some Google Reader items will have HTML markup in their titles, such as <em>.
- I check for failure in the Twitter API request.
- TwitterOAuth will return Boolean false if it could not complete its curl request to the API, and will return an XML document in any other case, including failure of the tweet to go through.
- If the cUrl request is good but the tweet doesn’t go through, Twitter responds with an HTTP status code other than 200. We can capture the last status code returned by our request, test it, and print the XML response describing what happened.
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