Comments on: No API? You Suck!

By: Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Great piece Brad and lots of good info about the importance of APIs these days.

A good discussion starting to form about your post on Friendfeed:

http://friendfeed.com/e/fe9d0e9c-2f6a-e069-47f5-0...

By: Jeremiah Johnson

Jeremiah Johnson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Don't list to Brad, you don't suck! You probably have all the confidence in the world in your devs but if you ask them to go build a public API without having a plan in mind then the result will be somewhere between silly and stupid. The mistake will be costly.

If you're building a consumer Web service, then focus delivering value and if someone realizes that they can deliver some specific value in an API then add it. Go slow building up the API or your going to burning up money. Seriously - the Amazon Web services weren't there at the beginning.

Thanks for the Mashery link - looks interesting.

By: David Greenstein

David Greenstein — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Don't forget about StillSecure! We have what we call our Enterprise Integration Framework which is based on a message bus publish/subscribe mechanism for subscribing to events, interacting with the system, and extending the system. It's helped us win our biggest deals since larger enterprises always require customizations and integration with their existing infrastructure. We're working on some very interesting APIs in our Cobia framework too.

By: Derek Scruggs

Derek Scruggs — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

@David - Depending on the business, charging for access is often a good option. SalesForce charges people to use their API and have built an entire ecosystem on it. The nice side benfit is that SalesForce.com customers expect to pay for access, so they don't balk at paying for integration between our products.

We allow paying customers to do cool things with our API like this

By: Derek Scruggs

Derek Scruggs — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Oops, that link didn't come out right. Here's the raw version:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/orange-county-register...

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Ah yes – I do love all my investments equally! Yup – StillSecure is another great API example.

By: zachlandes

zachlandes — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

I attended a lecture at Emory University by Adam Beguelin (beguelin.com), the founder of Truveo – a video search engine which AOL bought. One of his main points was on the value of building an API. I actually wrote up the whole interview on my blog, but …
"According to Adam, another key to Truveo's success has been its API. Truveo has maintained an api in 4 popular languages and not only does that give developers the ability to work the code into their site, but it also proved invaluable when Truveo was bought by AOL. Like many startups, Truveo had a small staff of less than 10 people when it was purchased by AOL. When the company was brought under the conglomerate's wing, requests came from every part of AOL asking for the attention of the Truveo team. By having a well-documented API, Truveo is able to refer the developers to the API and spend its own group resources on technology development."

By: David H Dennis

David H Dennis — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

But what's the revenue model?

You can't post ads if you're being used under an API, so how are you going to survive?

It seems to me that an API could be ruinous financially to the company that supplies it.

D

By: todd_sampso5628

todd_sampso5628 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Great post Brad. I am absolutely amazed at what Oren and his crew have already pulled off with Mashery — it has become a really great service. (And, obviously, Gnip is moving quickly there as well.)

I would recommend that everyone working on developing their APIs read Jon Udell's Hacking the Noosphere talk notes — especially the parts on HPIs and "Agreements, Protocols, Traditions":

http://jonudell.net/talks/cusec/cusec.html

And — blatant self-promo here — anyone looking to work on social APIs should check out the MyBlogLog's API. We are working on building what we call internally a "People DNS" system (lookup a person by ID on any service) and completely distributable profiles:

http://developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog/

Cheers,
Todd

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Presumably you believe that additional interoperability (via the API) will either (a) drive more traffic to your site in the consumer case or (b) enhance the value of your web service in the enterprise case. In (a) you get more traffic / more user value which should enhance whatever revenue approach you are taking (ads, subscriptions) and in (b) you will increase the value to your customer as well as integration with their other systems, which has clear long term benefit for any enterprise software or SaaS sale.

By: Oren Michels

Oren Michels — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Wow, just got off a plane, and got pinged by one of my VC's telling me about this post. Thanks so much, Brad – I appreciate the kudos, and of course we're thrilled to help anyone who needs it. @david dennis – there are several ways to make money on apis – both directly (you charge for them) or indirectly (attribution links drive traffic, like compete.com, you run more auctions, like ebay, etc.). Ping me and I'm happy to chat about it.

Oren MIchels
CEO
Mashery

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

I (obviously) disagree with this perspective. You don't have to spend much money to create an API. Your cost will be in supporting scale, which presumably is an "opportunity" that any consumer web service wants to achieve anyway.

I don't see AWS as a relevant example (or counter example) – it's a second order outgrowth of Amazon's amazing business, not a primary driver of their original ecommerce service. Oh – and there have been plenty of ways to integrate with Amazon (whether or not you want to call them APIs) since very early on (e.g. the incredibly successful affiliate business.)

By: mike_simon15701

mike_simon15701 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

I was just thinking about Technorati's API the other day as a way to save the company. (I presume it needs saving... ) What occurred to me is that the company should be _entirely_ API. Go for the full platform upon which a million blog search apps are based. Open the index in a way that google won't.

Technorati has tried bunch of UI approaches, obviously none have been more than moderately compelling. Why not let the rest of world give it a shot? Besides, the platform is always bigger than the app.

For example Powerset is apparently launching with just an index of Wikipedia. Why? because it's really hard to index a zillion blogs. If technorati provided their index, that'd be value. They could get to market immediately.

Also, there are tons of semantic/sentiment/data type companies analyzing blogs for marketing services, seo, financial, all kinds of apps. And right now these guys are doing all their own indexing.

It seems to me a simple volume license would be very workable.

So anyway, that's my conclusion. No charge.

By: Patrick Chanezon

Patrick Chanezon — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:53 +0000

Great post and thanks for the kind note about Google APIs. I have more details about how we went from 3 apis to 40 in 3 years in this preso: http://wordpress.chanezon.com/?p=37 It is from april, today mid june, we're at 60:-)
http://wordpress.chanezon.com/?p=60 about how to count them