Inopia

ProgrammableWeb hits 900 APIs

ProgrammableWeb just reached 900 APIs listed in it's directory - this is an amazing number since there were just 600 on Jan 14th this year - there's also been a slight dip in growth rate over the summer - with people probably storing up their launches for the fall, so I'd bet on being past 1000 by mid October by the latest (hopefully 3scale will help make that happen!). It's hard to over-estimate how important this is as a trend - programmable web is the reference site for APIs and so provides an important benchmark.

The fact that we're on course to double the number of APIs in what might be just a little over 12 months is incredible. Moores law (18 month doubling) would already be impressive if it was happening - but API deployment is a parallelisable process - not a serial one like chip design - so in principle API deployment could explode even faster.

Look for API "enablers" getting built into standard web tools (from drupal to systems like iceberg and others) - this was the secret sauce of RSS) and then I bet we'll see spectacular growth rates.

Great job to programmableweb as well for tracking all of this!

FireEagle, Twitter, ... new infrastructure for the Web

Yahoo's Fireeagle release today has already generated lots of coverage (here, here and elsewhere), but most of the coverage has focused on partner services + (partly) on the current lack of client apps for actually capturing and streaming your location into the service (which I think will get resolved in time). I think there's also another, more important dimension to this - services like fireeagle, plazes, brightkite and a few others is their potential role as an important piece of web infrastructure in their own right.

Twitter, plurk and co have a pretty obvious potential role as a messaging layer between all sorts of social applications. While a lot of the API usage is user to user, a lot of automated processing is also going on. The APIs provided by this service make them the obviously choice to add real time text sharing across different social applications. API's like fireeagle could play exactly the same role - another piece in the puzzle of data capture, sharing and re-integration in other applications. If Yahoo manages to keep the service A) neutral (i.e. keeps it open and plays no favourites with applications that push data in or take it out) and B) don't try to layer on more and more functionality, the service could be a major win for them.

Already when fireeagle info first surfaced, some commentators said "what - that's all it does?" - possible we'll even see more comments like that, but really this is smart strategy, do very little, do it extremely well and let everybody build on your infrastructure.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook, Google, Plaxo and others react - surely they want to be the guaradian's of their userbase's location data. Hopefully we'll get open standards and not a new set of walled gardens!

Rackspace IPO

Would love to know how much effect MOSSO had on the IPO (decision to go for it and on the price). It's pretty bold to move into the generic cloud space and rackspace is the perfect company to do it along side the big guns. Would love to see them build up the cloud and compete.

First real post

Since a hello world post really doesn't count here's the first bit of real content - some commentary on a post by Marc Benioff over at techcrunch which gave me the kick in the butt I needed to get blogging again (thanks Marc :). The post is old news now, but the content isn't - I fully agree with Marc's points here (including hating the Web 3.0 buzzword - but it looks like we might be stuck with that): applications are moving into the cloud and can be stiched together almost arbitrarily to create new value. The vision has been around for years - but it's only now that it's coming to fruition.

Where I'd go beyond what Marc says is that the action is not only in the "big clouds" like Amazon AWS, Mosso, Google, Salesforce.com but in hundreds of new APIs which are coming available from *all sorts of providers* - taking a look at the API trends at programmableweb.com shows the magnitude of what's happening - 60 new API's in 30 days is phenomenal growth. What's more - these API's and the mashups that use them are changing the structure of the Web - making all sorts of new things possible.

There's been a lot of chat about what "Web 3.0" might be - from the Semantic Web to the Mobile Web and a few other things, but I think at 3scale we're firmly in the camp that the next huge structural change in the Web is API related. Other technologies, such as additional semantics, are certainly doing cool stuff, but they're potentially more like ehancements and extensions of current content / infrastructure whereas APIs change the very nature of applications.

Plenty more on that topic to come I guess!

Hello World...! (Aka - Yet another tech startup blog...:)

A quick first post to get started :). it's been an intensive few months at 3scale working hard on code, customers, finance and all sorts of other stuff but slowly we're getting towards launch ready and there's some time for reflection - so a good time to start blogging again.

I used to post occasional off the wall thoughts at area67, but it was time for a new start. There'll be a 3scale company blog but here I plan to post a few personal insights and unsanctioned opinions on startup life, the industry and random stuff.

There are loads of great tech startup blogs from founders (hats off Marc Andreessen, Dharmesh Shah and loads of others), VC's (great stuff by Fred Wilson and the Venture hacks guys for example) and commentators (Techcrunch, Omm, RWW, ProgrammableWeb + loads of others - incoming PR coming your way soon no doubt), and I doubt I'll reach those heady heights - but maybe there'll be the odd useful insight. The fact that we're based in Barcelona might also add some interesting flavour :), 

The 3scale web site is up here: http://www.3scale.net/ - but not much info yet since we're in stealth mode - check there for more posts to come too.