Goodreads Plans to Retire API Access, Disables Existing API Keys ⇥ blog.stephanieawilkinson.com
Joe Alcorn (via Andy Baio):
In news that surprises nobody, Goodreads last week quietly announced the deprecation of their public APIs. And I mean really quietly – the only people who were told about this were those unfortunate enough to have their existing API keys disabled without warning. Other than a small banner at the top of the API docs which mentions vague “plans to retire these tools”, nobody else appears to have heard anything from Goodreads, including those whose API keys remain active. So far it seems any key unused for 30 days has been disabled.
They’ve given notice that they will shut down their APIs, effectively shutting down outside interaction with Goodreads data. In addition, the developer terms and conditions don’t allow storing of any Goodreads data, so users won’t be able to pull their data from Goodreads for use in other arenas.
This sucks.
Seems pretty bold for Amazon, which owns Goodreads, to further silo user data as it is being investigated for criminal antitrust violations. I am not a lawyer so I have no idea what, if any, legal repercussions there may be, but it sure doesn’t look great.