The Google API is a two-way street Column | The Google API is a two-way street. Google's new SOAP API seemed to follow a boom-and-bust trajectory. Everyone was excited about it until it arrived. Then doubts arose. "Bah," scoffed Edd Dumbill in an O'Reilly Network column (http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1303), "what a waste of space for something that can be done in one line of shell script." Edd's point -- that an HTML-screenscraping alternative to the Google SOAP API is easy to hack together -- is quite correct. But the conclusion -- that Google's SOAP API is silly -- is, I think, very wrong. [Jon Udell]
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