Marcos:

I get the decision to auto-expire manually entered listings since users will forget to take their listings off. I don't agree at all when it comes to listings that are fed.

I guarantee this decision results in more sold (e.g. inactive) listings staying on the site longer and I'll tell you why. There is a percentage of lazy programmers out there who will weigh the worth of their time programming a delete method versus listings auto-expiring on their own at a maximum of 30 days later. Responsible programmers will always program a delete method, regardless of this setting. Point in fact (as a responsible programmer myself), I have to do more work to auto-touch these listing records every 30 days if their still active and explain to users why their listing histories include a feed to Google even though there has been no actual update to the content.

Thing is, if you tell everyone listings will auto-expire in 30 days at maximum, a percentage of programmers will just leave it at that and Google will have an awful lot of listings having around for weeks after they've been sold. If you don't have this setting, more programmers (but I agree never all) will program a delete method on the removal of the unit. This is just common sense - a physics of sort for the minds of programmers.

Why would a vehicle be listed for more than 30 days? Really? The average lifespan of used stock in the boating industry is 4 - 5 months, depending heavily on the size and price. Even autos take longer than 30 days more than 30% of the time. It's just a weird decision - it sounds like it was the right decision made when listings were being manually added and someone applied the same reasoning to the feed system. In a true feed system, as the consumer of the data, you're not supposed to make any decisions about or changes to the data w/o the consent and explicit instruction of the feed provider.

Sorry for ranting - it seems like such a small thing. It's just one thing in a list of issues I've run across programming this integration and I felt at my breaking point over this.

Thanks,

Nick Owens

General Manager, VehicleMLS

Office: (904) 540-5830

From: Goog...@googlegroups.com [mailto:Goog...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Marcos Oliva Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 6:20 PM To: Goog...@googlegroups.com Subject: [Google-Base-API] Re: Definitive Answer on Expiration

Eric

In a way I do understand what you are saying and I am going through a similar situation with MLS real state listings expired periods and keeping them active, I am doing exactly as you are doing

But I do not see this as an annoyance (and no I do not own google stock at all) tera bytes of data are being sent to google base

why would you want to keep a listing over 30 days ? even with cars listings ? even with home listings ?

this opens more stream revenue on your situation where you can charge on added fee to keep those listings active after 30 days, I am for one will do it .

B2B integration, well I have been doing integrations also, from using WebMethods (OMG), SeeBeyond products, etc, I have seen worst management decisions when it comes to time lines and expiration modules on enterprises across the board, specially in HealtCare HL7 and X12 HIPPA compliance

This is just a business annoyance, hopefully google will have better documentation on how to implement this and their gotchas so a proper planning can be done here

just my opinion Eric,

marcos oliva

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Nick Owens <nico...@gmail.com> wrote:

Eric:

This is unimaginable. It's like taking B2B integrations back to elementary school!

I just scheduled a statement to "touch" my listings every 30 days if they're still active so that an update gets sent over automatically. I have the ability to auto-run SQL statements in my admin panel but for others who do not have this luxury, this may present a challenge.

I hate having to run this statement b/c it means a history record will get written every 30 days next to my listings letting users know that their listing was fed successfully to Google Base. They'll also get an email and a message in their admin letting them know that the update to Google Base was successful. For this single integration, I'll have to explain to my users that Google requires listings to be auto-re-sent each 30 days in order to remain active. Doesn't that sound like an annoyance from a lot of angles?

I've been doing B2B integrations for 10 years and I've never seen some of these incredulous decisions. And I thought I had seen it all in my years...