Business Development and Open API’s
With the rise of open API’s, is Web 2.0 changing?
Fred Wilson at A VC had some very interesting comments today in his Business Development 2.0 post regarding open API’s, including to state the importance of implementation. With Facebook’s recent launch of Facebook Developers, Zillow’s Open API (disclosure- I work there), and Yahoo Answers API being announced in the past month or so, it is clear the web is opening up. It seems to be all about being “everywhere” on the web to bring brand exposure. Afterall, if Yahoo Answers is already being used in a variety of applications across the web, it becomes that much harder for another competitor to enter the market.
A whole new wave of mashups are bound to result from sites using a variety of open API’s and stitching them together in a new and cool way. All you have to do is look the number of API’s Google has to realize that other sites are going to follow similar paths. Why? Because Google is King right now and everyone wants to emulate the “big dog.”
[...] People are firmly entrenched with Myspace and Facebook- He even says, “I’ve seen signs of “MySpace” burn out,” which confirms my own observations and thoughts. People are tired of the myspace SPAM. Ultimately, the more users a company controls, the more prone to SPAM and hacking they will become. Look at Microsoft vs Apple. You hardly ever hear about hackers targeting Apple. Why bother to hack Apple since Microsoft controls 90%+ of desktop machines? I won’t say anything bad about facebook because I firmly believe in their model. To me, they should not be grouped with myspace because they do serve niches by catering to certain college campuses. [...]