the end of Yahoo! BOSS?

[tmsdev]

Now that Yahoo search is going away, there is a very good chance their BOSS search API will be gone as well - after all, it's hard to expect them to keep an API for a dead service. Apparently, some poor souls who trusted Yahoo and have invested their time and money into working with this API, are now doing all they can to save it, including writing to the Department of Justice about a possible antitrus lawsuit, since Microsoft and Google both offer very limited APIs that are not nearly as flexible as Yahoo's.

The problem is much bigger than Yahoo, though - any kind of third-party service, especially now with all the cloud trends going on - requires a large amount of trust from the people who decide to build on top of it. Sadly, many times it has happened that not just due to a huge industry shift such as Yahoo-MS deal, or bankruptcy, but simply on the whim of some manager who randomly decides to "change direction", the developers can be screwed over pretty badly when different features or the whole API gets shut down. Like Ning, which, after it got the momentum it was looking for from the early geek audience, suddenly ditched their "almost open-source" and "let's all develop in PHP and make the service better" mantras and cut off the access to whatever code people built for them. Or Js-kit dropping about 3/4 of their features and also screwing over everyone who relied on them. The more we rely on cloud or any other third-party services, the more similar problems we will see.