Inopia

Survery of 1000 Latest APIs - Not just Tech Startups Anymore

Over at 3scale we put together a mini-survey of the latest 1000 APIs to get listed on programmable web and came up with some interesting results: 

• Only 17% of the APIs in the last 3 months came from what would be seen as Tech Startups.
• Most APIs come from small and medium companies - but the true long tail has yet to emerge.
• Business Models are becoming consolidated.
• Mobile is a major driver for APIs - although the number of APIs serving purely mobile was lower than expected, over 60% of all listed APIs targeted mobile in some way.

Looking forward to people's thoughts on the trends!

Welcome to the New 3scale!

Super happy we've just launched the new 3scale platform - a lot more feature to help people publish and manage great APIs. 

• The Team news: Welcome to the New 3scale – more power to you!
• The Press Release version: 3scale Democratizes APIs With New Free Self-Service API Management Infrastructure

A lot of new APIs in the pipeline.

 

My Data, Your Service - The thin red line of User Data Access APIs (LinkedIn shuts out BranchOut and Others)

Today's news that Linked in has shut off API access to Branch Out, BeKnown, Visible.Me and a number of others once again illustrates the tension between openning data and controlling monetization (in a similar way to Twitter's service changes recently). LinkedIn's reason for shutting down the access is primarily that these companies may be planning premium services which draw on LinkedIn's data (and potentially be a threat to LinkedIn's own monetisation plans).

 

It would be easy to say that this is a mistake on LinkedIn's part (because of the chilling effect it will almost certainly have on usage of the API) or that it's a no-brainer since other companies are getting (free) access to LinkedIn's prized asset. However, there is another factor to take into account which is neatly put in BranchOut's response to LinkedIn:

"we believe user data should be owned by the user, and that people should be allowed to share their data with the new services and contexts that provide the most utility."

While this may appear a little self serving, LinkedIn profiles are curated by the owners - LinkedIn is effectively the channel for these profiles to reach an audience. Although LinkedIn's terms of service may have all manner of restrictions within them and LinkedIn adds a large amount of value this still raises the question - is LinkedIn an effective channel for distribution of my profile information if it chooses to exclude a broad range of uses of it's API?

In other words, as a LinkedIn user one of my greatest utilities is that I can point people to my profile, have them find me and connect to keep in touch. This is not disimilar to Tweets on Twitter - the fact that Twitter pushes tweets to others by many channels is one of it's major value adds. Shuting off API access actually reduces that value and might make me seek alternatives. 

So how can this circle be squared? 

I'd argue that rather than shutting off access, LinkedIn should instead;

• Put a price on this access above a certain volume.
• Potentially even as a %age of revenue that value added services earn.
• Set rules such as "no caching" beyond a strict time limit to ensure data cannot be entirely replicated.
• See these services as a value add that will actually drive more users to add profiles to LinkedIn because distribution is wider.
• Set clear rules of engagement and not change them over time.

Might some of the services conflict with LinkedIn's own plans? Possibly, but as long as the price is right, this may even be a net gain. 

Facebook seems to be ahead of both LinkedIn and Twitter in this respect - it's 30/70% revenue split with Zynga and other games already ensures that there is always cashback for innovation that draws on it's platform.

BranchOut's statement that the loss of API Access is not a big deal ring a little hollow, however LinkedIn's actions certainly mean that people may begin to seek other places to host their professional profiles that allow more distribution.

 

 

 

 

 

What is an API? Your guide to the Internet Business (R)evolution

There's a new whitepaper up on the 3scale website - What is an API? Your guide to the Internet Business (R)evolution - definitely worth checking out. It's always tough to find the right metaphors to explain the value of APIs, so we've given it a shot. 

Dion Hinchcliffe summarizes it best:

“We are nearing the time when opening our supply chains across the Web isn’t just a good idea, it will be essential for competitive survival"

A nice timely reminder since just a couple of days ago programmableweb crossed 3000 APIs in their directory - impressive and more to come no doubt!

What Foursquare should do to compete with Facebook - "Go Public"

I'm sure the foursquare team has their strategy well in hand after the announcement of Facebook places and maybe this is way off base anyway, but I was suprised to see little real press analysis on what paths they might take (instead is was mainly doom and gloom - (TNW, CNN)). But it seems to me there are clear paths and one of the them could be to yank the steering wheel to one side and "Go Public" (not in the IPO sense - in the social network model sense!). 

To explain this, one of the things that always struck me as the *key* difference between twitter and facebook is: twitter is public broadcast, facebook is group narrowcast. I.e. twitter has asymmetric relations, facebooks are symmetric.

So facebook (although there is a public mode) requires both parties to friend.

This makes twitter and facebook fundamentally different - and I think means that twitter can and will continue to grow very strongly. Because of the type of data shared on facebook it's simply difficult for them to push asymetric relationships.

On location I could see the same thing happening. The "normal" way of thinking about location is "I share with my friends" - symmetric relationships. This also makes sense for security in some sense.

So it seems to me that if foursquare is able to push it's asymetric relationships - i.e. anybody can follow anyone for location information:

• it would make a big change to the service 
• but it would give it a much different utility to facebook.

broadcasting location publically has the chance to create chance meetings, to interact with locations / brands in a way narrowcasting to friends doesn't. Also facebook is unlikely to open the privacy settings much (or make the defaults public) because it is already embroilled in various privacy issues.

An example would be, people checking into a bar in Barcelona - they might post on facebook so their friends know, but they might also post on foursquare so "everybody" knows (basically this is equivalent to posting "I'm at Harry's Bar in Barcelona" on Twitter). Facebook places may allow you to do this also but the focus is different and theres a big risk of confusion between public and private settings. 

Basically a foursquare which focused on a twitter like public broadcast of location could provide a much different platform to facebook places and become the basis of different types of location aware services. You may post there "less" but you'll post there when there is some real utility to doing so like meeting new people in a bar, collecting coupons & points, getting timely information etc. 

Facebook Rocks the Web

Facebook's F8 Keynote is a must watch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfLBZcEpG_I - four parts) for the future of the web. The announcements have already led to a lot of commentary - and alarm in some cases about what it might mean for the openness of the web. Check our Chris Messina's posts here and here for great commentary in the text and comments. It's even lead to to a nascent group to provide an alternative mechanism for some of Facebook's new features - openlike (see here for the homepage).

There are ton of things in Facebooks's announcements: 

• Simplyfing their own API (check out: http://graph.facebook.com/stevenwillmott -> that's me in JSON format, if you were authorised you could also get /events /updates, /whatever...) - couldn't be simpler. 
• A number of plugins for web sites that can overlay facebook's information from your profile correlated to the domain of the website your visiting on that site.
• New meta-data to mark up web pages with semantic information which facebook can use to understand people's relationship with the content on the page - Michael Bleigh hits the nail on the head when he calls it a private beta of the semantic web. 
• One particular plugin which provides a "like button" that allows a user to "like" content on any site using the plugin and signal that like back to facebook - either into the activity stream of the user or even to create a meaningful connection if some of the aforementioned meta-data is present (for example all of IMDB's movie web pages now include meta-data so if you "like" one of them it goes straight into your list of favorite movies on facebook).
• Facebook adopting openAuth (oAuth) as it's authentication standard - a great step for openAuth adoption.
• Some deeper integrations with selected web sites which allow deep access to the user profile even without logging in. 

Together with the strong growth of Facebook connect these announcements are really powerful - as Mark Zuckerberg puts it in the keynote - the web is becoming "social by default" and facebook is putting itself at the center of this people centric web (maybe a bit too central too quickly).

The changes mostly mean the potential for a better web - with more meta-data and more information available to all, as well as more gravitation to standards like openAuth, but there's clear concern that they facebook's march will lead to a single provider world for identity and social relationships. To me, the moves they made make huge business sense - and they are right to push the envelope - throwing down the gauntlet to others to innovate. However, there are several things which are worrying:

• While the meta-data formats are open and some data can be extracted back out of facebook, facebook is in effect making itself the curator of the link information - of what is connected to what - this is hugely powerful, important information (Yuval Kogman makes the same point). 
• While it's possible to get data back on a person by person basis (using open auth) the aggregate data isn't available unless Facebook chooses to release it, for some things such as friend links this makes sense since it's private data arguably, however for others such as "likes" it's not obvious that this wouldn't be better available publicly - the web would be a better place of "like" data was open (openlike would be a good thing if it succeeds).
• The moves will massively reinforce Facebooks lead as an "identity provider" - the place where users aggregate their lives on the web - not just on facebook but increasingly on all other web properties. Healthier would be if multiple such providers large and small could co-exist.

Obviously many social sites walk this thin line between retaining information as competitive advantage and for user privacy reasons and exposing it to add to the information on the web. The more of the "edges" of the graph that facebook keeps private the worse for the web (and the more self-serving for facebook) these announcement's are. 

I suspect that F8 next year or the year after could see the announcement of the opening of not only READ APIs into facebook but also more and more WRITE APIs which allow everything from friending to user creation. Facebook.com will become just one of the many consumers of the facebook API. This will allow third parties to build essentially parallel facebook.com's with different interfaces. While Facebook might now want to do this for brand control reasons, it makes total sense in the long run. 

This might in turn be of huge benefit to the web since the APIs in turn might become standardized and adopted by other identity / profile providers - the social graph might open right back out again if it becomes possible to "friend" across providers. 

Open APIs and Open Standards

John Borthwick has been advising companies for a while now to build APIs that mimic the Twitter API. His reasoning is that if your API look and feels similar to the Twitter API then third party developers will have an easier time adopting it and building to it. Makes sense to me.

via www.avc.com

There was a great thread on AVC this week on the impact of twitter's API being specs being reused by others (check out the lengthy comments thread as well).  I think this is the beginning of a trend and we'll see a lot more of it in different types of apps:

• APIs for different content types are likely to come in similar forms (there just aren't that many ways to build a half-way efficient blogging API).
• Familiarity helps adoption and reduces friction for everybody 
• Although different services often have unique features there's likely to be a "common core"

Actual standardization (W3C et. al.) is probably not on the cards right now but some convergence looks inevitable and beneficial to all. There are two interesting dimensions to look at: 

• Convergence by application/content type: where you could see standard patterns emerging to for video, audio, messaging, blog posting, news etc. 
• Convergence by individual type of operation: e.g. user account creation, payment, creation of relationships (friend, follow...), search etc.

In the second case building blocks can be recompiled into complete APIs. 

I hope we see more moves in this direction since it will reduce friction in API provision and usage - making it easier for everybody to focus on the business of building great apps with third party APIs.