UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

Web services are programming interfaces provided by a web site that an external program can use to exchange information with that website. For example, the photo-sharing site Flickr provides a web service interface that allows other programs to directly upload and download photos to a user’s Flickr account. That way, a user can store a library of digital photos on the Flickr website, but manage and view the photos with a separate desktop application.

Web services have enabled a whole new world of online interactivity by allowing anyone to create new and innovative applications on top of existing websites. Users who have an account on the social networking site Facebook can view their friends on a map or form a sports picking pool with their friends. Users of the social bookmarking site del.icio.us can graphically visualize their bookmarks or find out which bookmarks are used most. These are just a few examples of the new and creative features built by users of these websites and made possible by web services.

Similarly, Google provided web services that allowed external programs to perform searches and get the search results. Many interesting applications have been built that rely on Google search results provided by the Google Search web service. Unfortunately, Google has decided to discontinue this service:

Google has quietly axed the web services API to its eponymous search engine. The stealth move was made without any announcement, but visitors to the page now receive a blunt message, backdated to 5 December, advising them that the SOAP API is no longer supported.

The Register: Google axes search API

The Google Search web service was a free service provided by Google and was never promised to be available forever, but sudden end of the service is quite a shock to many developers. Now that it is being discontinued, the hundreds of software projects that rely on it will eventually stop working.

This is the biggest problem with web services and the idea of a service-oriented Web 2.0: While a service-oriented software model makes new things possible, it removes all control from the end user or third-party software developer. All of the new and exciting uses of Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us, and the like are only available as long as the website owners allow it. Even though the new features were created by third parties, the real control belongs to the owner of the website being accessed and any use deemed inappropriate for any reason can be blocked.

As more users come to rely on websites like Flickr and Facebook to manage their personal lives and personal data, it is important for them to remember that data stored on those websites is only available as long as the website makes it available. A change in corporate mood (like in the case of Google) or a change in corporate ownership could leave users stranded without data access they depend on.