Spring cleaning for some of our APIs

JUNE 3, 2011

By Adam Feldman, APIs Product Manager

UPDATE June 3: In the days since we announced the deprecation of the Translate API, we’ve seen the passion and interest expressed by so many of you, through comments here (believe me, we read every one of them) and elsewhere. I’m happy to share that we’re working hard to address your concerns, and will be releasing an updated plan to offer a paid version of the Translate API. Please stay tuned; we’ll post a full update as soon as possible.

Google I/O is always an exciting time for developers. This year we made 34 separate announcements, including 7 new APIs:

Discovery Service
Tasks API
Books API
Pagespeed Online API
Places API (now generally available)
Prediction API (now generally available)
Fusion Tables API (additional feeds)

With all of the recent API announcements, our API directory is getting quite long! However, some of our older APIs have been superseded by bigger and better things and others may not be receiving the necessary love.

As the web evolves and priorities change, we sometimes deprecate APIs – that is, remove them from active development – to free up resources and concentrate on moving forward. Today we're announcing a spring cleaning for some of our APIs.

Note that the vast majority of Google APIs are not affected by this announcement.

Following the standard deprecation period – often, as long as three years – some of the deprecated APIs will be shut down. The rest have no scheduled date for shutdown, but won’t get any new features. The policy for each deprecated API is specified in its documentation.

These APIs are now deprecated but have no scheduled shutdown date: Code Search API, Diacritize API, Feedburner APIs, Finance API, Power Meter API, Sidewiki API, Wave API
These APIs will be shut down as per their deprecation policies: Blog Search API, Books Data API and Books JavaScript API (not the new API), Image Search API, News Search API, Patent Search API, Safe Browsing API (v1 only), Translate API, Transliterate API, Video Search API, Virtual Keyboard API

Wherever possible, the documentation includes suggested alternatives designed to help you achieve similar functionality — whether it’s a new version or related offering. We hope these alternatives, along with lengthy deprecation periods, will help minimize the impact and allow us to focus on building great products together.

Adam Feldman is a Product Manager, focusing on all of Google's APIs and making sure Google provides the best possible platform to developers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor