Ask HN: What 3rd party APIs do you wish your company wasn't using?

2 points by untilHellbanned 10y ago ↗ HN

What tools do you use that you wish your company wasn't using for strategic reasons and/or out of existential fear to your business if this tool disappeared tomorrow?

For example, we are interested in building out some custom user tracking and currently use Google Analytics (GA). We're grabbing some stats from GA API but because user behavior on our site is key to our business, I'm wondering about the downsides of this type of dependency. Obviously, Google is a strong, stable company, but so is Facebook. You hear all the time about companies, e.g., Zynga, who have relied on FB (and Google and you name it...) APIs getting burned, so we'd like to make good long-term decisions. I'd be interested in people's thoughts on how to benefit from the richness of tools and APIs out there while still building a moat around your company core assets.

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PaulHoule 10y ago ↗

Google Analytics is particularly bad because if you are planning to make money by making web sites, Google has to eat your lunch if it is going to keep putting up numbers to keep investors happy.

If you use GA, Google will eventually use your usage statistics to make its own content, and there will come a day when people do a Google search and there are no organic results above the fold, on the first page, and eventually at all.