Hi Paul, The Terms of Use can be found by starting here:
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/terms.html This page extends and clarifies the general Terms of Use. At this time we do not have a special Terms of Service for the API. I can't give any sort of legal guidance as to if something is or isn't acceptable within the Terms of Use, and we recommend developers seek legal counsel if they would like to ensure their use is lawful. There should not be a rate limit on legitimate traffic, within reason. The feed URI for a spreadsheet shouldn't change arbitrarily. Any breaking changes to the API will be announced ahead of time, giving developers a grace period to update their code. I can't speculate, however, what the API might look like several years from now. Cheers, -Jeff On Jan 22, 8:32 pm, Paul <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm working on a mostly-decentralized P2P network, for use by students > in college dorms. In order for nodes to discover the network, they > download a short block of config from a known place on the Internet > which contains a list of IP addresses to try contacting. > > I've come up with a few ideas of where to store this config, and one > of them is a published Google Spreadsheet. I'm wondering if this use > would be consistent with Google's terms of service, and whether it > might be at risk of tripping any rate limits. > > There will be a single node which logs into a Google account and > changes values in a spreadsheet through an https connection, a couple > times per hour. > > There will be on the order of 1000 nodes who receive this config by > polling the public GData feed of the spreadsheet using an https > connection. Each node will typically run 2-5 queries per day. So, > we're looking at fewer than 5000 hits per day on a published > spreadsheet that contains a few lines of machine-readable text. > > Here's an example of a URL that a node might be > fetching:https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/pKlsSn6Kzk9i5xt5OHe0PEg/1... > > So, my question is, is this an acceptable usage of the Google API? > > Another related question, what can be said about the long-term > stability of the URL for a given spreadsheet? Could this be expected > to stay constant for several years? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Data API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-help-dataapi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
