Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
September 2010 necro-update: How things have evolved through the last decade! There’s now api-status.com to get the pulse of dozens of public APIs. You read it here first as per this entry originally from 2004.
People who use the Amazon.com web services routinely complain about their sluggishness. In the dedicated discussion board, after someone suggested they create an XML feed to advertise the current availability and average response time, as well as planned downtime, a developer from Amazon said they’d look into it. Better late than never, I advocated something similar for Paypal in late 2001.
Sometimes I wonder whether their web services are anything more than a cool gizmo for Amazon.com. They certainly don’t give the impression they consider this a mission critical tool. Affiliates who use Amazon’s web service need to cache the data and avoid live calls that might break their own site.
10/05/04 update: Rips in the Web 2.0 fabric.
11/05/04 update: Bringing Web Services to the Masses.
02/26/06 update: Trust.Salesforce.com.
09/24/07 update: this is finally something more companies are doing now, e.g. heartbeat.skype.com.
09/01/09 update: Google Apps Status.
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.
2 Responses to Web Services Need to Advertise Their Health Status
Anil
March 14th, 2004 at 10:19 pm
PaylPal and eBay have developer blogs that let people know about things like API status:
http://paypal.typepad.com/pdn/
Olivier Travers
March 14th, 2004 at 11:39 pm
I know about this blog, it’s a step in the right direction. They should have something machine-readable too, so that your software can act accordingly (e.g. you ask Paypal in real time whether they’re available, and if they aren’t, you route your customer to an alternate payment gateway instead of leading them to failure and losing some orders).