The Truth about API’s – Need For an Open Service Definition

Over at O’Reilly (our new MiniBar partner) they have an interesting post on the dangers of relying on API’s when building a business.

It seeems certain that we will see interesting battles emerging between those who for eg built a service for Second Life inhabitants, get really successful and then SL pulls the plug.

This relates to an earlier discussion O’Reilly kicked off, but which went nowwhere: if web 2.0 relies on users creating networks of meaning (through aggregating data) who owns this data. See our earlier discussion. Call me naive, but if Open API’s only exist to give big companies ‘free innovations’, then that’s certainly not in the spirit of Free Software. Here the O’Reilly Post:

1. Free APIs are not a god-given right. Businesses offer them for their own self-interested reasons. If you build on top of the API but aren’t delivering the value for the business that provides the API, your use of the API will probably go away.
2. If you build your own business on top of an API, you need a contractual relationship to ensure the service doesn’t get taken away from you. These generally cost money.
3. If you find a way to get something from a site that isn’t explicitly offered as something for you to build on, your use of it will probably be fought unless you’re delivering value as in (1).
4. The provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that’s difficult to replicate, something beyond a simple UI tweak or a feature like “search”, so that the business that provides the API doesn’t simply compete with you when you look like you’re succeeding.
5. For these reasons, free APIs are a very poor substitute for having the source and the data and thus owning and controlling every piece of your application.
6. For these reasons, there’s no such thing as a free API if you’re looking to build a business.