Well, between yesterday and today, GoogleMaps has changed their interface. This has broken my Travelogue as well as the post map in the right-sidebar of my site.

As evidenced by Flickr and other sites, providing developers and enthusiasts a public interface to your tools is both great for ideas, development, and advertising. I used GoogleMaps more because I can fool around with it in my own stuff, for much the same reason I started using Flickr over Snapfish or the other photo sharing sites.

But with Google sticking to the "Beta" moniker, they allow a gateway for themselves to change the API, and other functionality willy-nilly with no warning, or support for prior versions. Obviously they are actively developing and updating (the map-satellite icons are different on the maps.google.com page) but it reminds me that Google is a company who is interested first, and foremost, in the company and it's money. Of course, being publicly traded, this is reinforced now by stockholder's interests.

Google is doing a similar thing by attempting to restrict GreaseMonkey scripts from operating in Gmail.

This reminds me of the great article about how another fruit company that has a beloved community has moved from "we company" to a "they company".