Steve breaks radio silence and admits he is a pooka (from Bad Sinatra).

A lot of good stuff in this post, but I want to highlight one part. 

I posted the other day about the deprecation of the Google API.  My take: good for the Google; bad for the gaggle (i.e., the application developers).  Fun to talk about, but there are pragmatic solutions to this.  Something to be scared of?  No.

We (the users) needn’t be scared of vendor choices like this.  Why not?  Because nobody is forcing us to use these services.  As Steve says:

Who am I supposed to be scared of? Google? Nope, if the Ajax API and the terms of service around including unaltered adsense are so counter to user interest, that will precipitate a decline in usage and therefore less adoption of Google properties. Seems self-correcting to me: user votes, user wins. Why do we need saving here?

Exactly.