For a very deep, thorough and painful treatment instead of feel-good books, read "Practical API Design" by Jaroslav Tulach. Yes, it's Java, but it exemplifies the fundamental tradeoff that the feel-good books ignore: the more powerful you make your API for users, the less potential for evolution and long-term maintenance your API retains.
I believe that instead of messing around with a known standard (username + password fields), it would be better if web services would implement two-factor authentication. Password managers would become useless then, because you would be able to use simple passwords that you may remember, while being even more secure.
Google wants website owners to use Webmaster Tools so that it can connect websites with individuals. The end goal is to make it harder for people to manipulate search results in a way that would result in an inferior user experience for searchers.
For many years, Google has been a gold mine to a profession called "SEO". It still is, but every single day it is getting harder to extract value from it if all you do is trying to get your site to the top of the SERPs. Eventually it will be very expensive to trick Google and this is why I see many professional SEOs starting work at big brands or doing consulting for them. It's easier to get good rankings for a site that provides great value to users than for another spammy endeavor.
I was also involved in this business many years ago, but mainly to rank my sites that were getting traffic anyway because of the value they provided to users. Instead of being angry, I think that SEOs should be thankful that Google made it possible for them to take advantage of their service and even helped them along the way — I am. There is nothing wrong in charging people money for services that they use to make money themselves.
SEO should always only be a tool that helps you reach users with your quality product, not your main way of making a living because in itself it creates no value to society.
Ugh. Someone is wrong on the internet and I just can't ignore that.
SEO doesn't create value for the society? That is an extremely bold claim. Guest posts, infographics and other form of viral content are a very common tools for so these days. They create immense value for content consumers and that's the point. SEO is very much white hat these days in the anglosphere due to superior Google search spam detection algorithms. There are black hats, of course but they are not a defining market force for a long time already.
