[corin_]

You're right that using it was always a risk, and as the article says, Google were completely within their right to shut it down without any warning.

However, wouldn't it have served them better from a PR point of view to give a warning, even if only a week in advance? If all these people have been using it for so long, another week of bandwidth/etc. isn't exactly going to break the bank, and it would have been the nice thing to do, to come out and say "hey, you weren't meant to be doing this, but we'll be helpful and give you a heads up to give you time to move off it".

[pearkes]

It's funny, they did give a warning of sorts.

Around a month prior to turning everything off, they started throwing in a random 403 to requests. No reasoning - just like it was being added by them to deter use.

I noticed this and just simply put in a try/catch, which "solved" the problem. Luckily I'm not building a business on it (that'd be pretty silly) so the downtime isn't the end of the world.

Here's a Stack Overflow post from during the "warning period": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11878143/google-weather-a...

Seems like it was their way of giving us a heads up.

[qwertzlcoatl]

The 403s probably were Google already shutting down the system. They have many servers performing the same functions; propagating a new version of the server software (in this case, an update with the weather API stripped) can take days, and in the mean time, it's luck of the draw whether you're on an old functioning server, or a new 403-spitting one. This is entirely by design: this way, if there's something wrong with an update, it doesn't immediately affect everyone, and they can hotfix things before it runs on all servers.