Since Feb. 2010 I have been working on a pet project called Informant. The project interfaces with Google Voice and allows the user to send SMS messages to a group of contacts from their Google Contacts. The application has been working great since its first release in Mar. 2010. However, in the last month I’ve received reports that it was not working. Users have been unable to authenticate with Google which was most concerning. I started to look into a solution and found nothing online that could help me. With out time to fix the issue, the problem has persisted until today. I decided to take a different approach and try to find another .NET implementation of the Google Voice API. After looking for a while I found one on Source Forge called GVoiceDotNet. Their implementation is authenticating exactly the same way as I’m doing in Informant. Both projects use the ClientLogin API for Google Accounts. I didn’t notice any differences until I starting doing a side by side comparison of the URLs we are using to authenticate. The change, while small, made a big difference.

My Original URL: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?service=grandcentral

GVoiceDotNet URL: https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLoginAuth

There is only one breaking change between these two URLs. No, it’s not the service=grandcentral. That part is apparently not required and is ignored. The URL www.google.com/accounts is no longer valid, it is now accounts.google.com.

I am totally surprised that Google changed this URL and even more surprised that I can’t find any documentation about this change. Perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong place? It doesn’t really matter, I’m just stoked to have Informant back up and running!

If you don’t use Google Voice, you should definitely check it out! And check out Informant on Codeplex!