I Saw It Coming

Back in August I wrote a post about some issues I saw with the Web 2.0 business model that, although I had not seen happen yet, I knew could become a problem. Well today it came and bit me in the butt. The Google Maps team released a change to their API that completely broke CommunityWalk. It wasn't really a bug with their API, but more of a problem that another third party library I use, prototype, had with the new changes.

In general this is going to be a difficulty with the mixing and mashing that many Web 2.0 applications out there use to enhance the user's experience. Google has ensured me that they will provide more of a testing ground before they release such changes in the future, but the potential for problems will continue to exit nonetheless.

I was able to address the problem by reverting back to the previous version of the GoogleMaps API. Now I just need to try and figure out how to manage and fix the interaction between these two APIs.