One to Watch’s film querying at risk
One to Watch, my app to help you remember films you want to watch, uses Freebase when it’s searching for films. Freebase is an amazing database, built on community data. Google bought Freebase a few years ago, and made Freebase into the basis of Knowledge Graph. Up until now, this hasn’t been a problem; Google kept the old Freebase API up and running, albeit at new URLs.
However, by chance when updating some URL handling code in One to Watch, I was checking the Freebase API and noticed:
Warning: The Freebase API will be retired on June 30, 2015.
Oh oh.
[Before the end of March 2015] We’ll announce a transition plan for the Freebase Search API & Suggest Widget to a Knowledge Graph-based solution
Fingers crossed for anything half so powerful as the Freebase API. Otherwise I’m not sure what One to Watch will use. In addition, Freebase becomes read-only on March 31st, which means there’ll be no new films added.
Slightly worried: I can’t easily tell my users why OtW might just stop working for them – even if I can update the app, users of older versions are going to be upset :(