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Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

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Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#11
Is great to see a lot of companies releasing APIs but if even better as a developer start a project and being able to easily use external services and even integrate your app with bigger services. Imagine creating an e-commerce an integrating your catalog with stuff from macys, amazon, etc.

Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#12
post #2

"The long tail is still missing in action" - plug&play arriving onto the API scene is going to change that fast.

What is plug&play? Is it a concept similar to Microsoft's driver system, or is it a startup, or is it a standard for API designers?

Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#13

Is great to see a lot of companies releasing APIs but if even better as a developer start a project and being able to easily use external services and even integrate your app with bigger services. Imagine creating an e-commerce an integrating your catalog with stuff from macys, amazon, etc.

I think this will end up happening - Amazon already lets you suck out it's catalogue and push affiliate sales back to it. You could likely build very sophisticated niche virtual retail sites if all the bricks and motar data was there also.

Interestingly in the survey the number of ecommerce APIs was actually a lot lower than we thought it would be. This might be a blip in this "generation" of APIs, or that it's simply hard to do still.

Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#14
post #13

Is great to see a lot of companies releasing APIs but if even better as a developer start a project and being able to easily use external services and even integrate your app with bigger services. Imagine creating an e-commerce an integrating your catalog with stuff from macys, amazon, etc.

I think this will end up happening - Amazon already lets you suck out it's catalogue and push affiliate sales back to it. You could likely build very sophisticated niche virtual retail sites if all the bricks and motar data was there also. Interestingly in the survey the number of ecommerce APIs was actually a lot lower than we thought it would be. This might be a blip in this "generation" of APIs, or that it's simpl…

Amazon has a great vision, others are just afraid about people "stealing" their content. Probably companies need to be educated in this area

Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#18
post #15

Glad to see the takeup of APIs by the public sector. Will be interesting to watch whether emerging API management solutions can help the open data movement by enabling smarter ways of accessing government data.

The US definitely seems to be leading here - makes more sense to open data than to try to provide more and more different UIs that people need (iPhone, Android, ...). Of the APIs on programmable web in that period almost all were US, a couple were UK and a couple we Canadian.

Further back in time there are other countries also though - and a lot of the Scientific APIs were European.

Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#19
post #12
post #2

"The long tail is still missing in action" - plug&play arriving onto the API scene is going to change that fast.

What is plug&play? Is it a concept similar to Microsoft's driver system, or is it a startup, or is it a standard for API designers?

I'd say platforms like stackmob which create mobile APIs + wordpress, drupal etc. which make it easy to add an API to those + then platforms like 3scale, mashery etc. which help manage access.

Re: Surveying 1000 APIs - Think APIs are for Tech Startups Only? Think Again

#20
post #17

I think that Twitter has absorbed some of the long tail - it's pretty easy to use a twitter account as a proxy for read and write commands for a low scale device or web site, of course you can't make it a chargeable interaction!

Pretty interesting way to think of twitter - kind of a message bus.
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