Gratuitous Breakage

This morning I got the following email from ShrinkTheWeb:

STW: Attention, Code Change Required! YOU MAY APPLY THESE CHANGES AT ANY TIME BEFORE JULY 16TH

So they are changing their api. For those who do not know, ShrinkTheWeb is a kickass web service which enables you to easily take screenshots of web pages. I use it for, among other things, The VPS List.

While I realize that api has to be broken from time to time, the proposed changes are just silly and it is humourous that they weren't able to insulate end users from them.

Change www.shrinktheweb.com/xino.php TO images.shrinktheweb.com/xino.php

Or your web server could be set up to serve the same php script at both links.

make all stw variables lowercase

Because it is so hard for you to lowercase all variables yourself before processing them? :)

use the newer stw-specific variable names

I don't get this change either. What advantage is there in prefixing GET-variables with a stw-prefix?

Don't get me wrong, ShrinkTheWeb is a very useful web service, but the above mentioned stuff is basically the very definition of gratuitous breakage.