Deltacloud | Many Clouds. One API. No Problem. Darwin’s Finches, 20th Century Business, and Open APIs: Evolve Y. When the world is changing quickly there is great pressure to adapt in order to survive. Darwin observed this in Galapagos Islands and codified the process into “On Origin of Species”. A century later DNA was identified as the mechanism of adaption and evolution by Watson and Crick.
In just twenty more years Richard Dawkins called out the individual gene as the atomic unit of competition. Looking at business through an evolutionary lens there is much to observe. Many industries have changed dramatically, and today we see only the result of the successful adaptations. The overall economy of the technology space is moving from a web-based model to one based on more open, agile, collaborative technologies enabled by cloud computing and APIs.
Sam Ramji is the former head of open source strategy at Microsoft and presently VP of strategy Sonoa Systems provider or enterprise API management solutions and Apigee, a lifecycle platform for API developers. The talk will discuss: 2009 Presentations and Video « The Business of APIs — brought to. Inopia: 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.
Google Introduces API Console. If you use Google APIs much, you might be interested in checking out Google's latest product for developers. Coming straight from the fine people at Google Code, the API console is the fruit of a yearlong effort to better organize Google's APIs. The new console will help developers manage their API usage for all their applications and websites. For the console, you can log in with your Google credentials to see data for all your API projects. If you're working with a team, you can create and manage project teams from the console. The console will also help you track exactly how you use each API, and you can get stats on API usage for your app or site, such as specific rate limits, which pages are making the most API calls and graphs of API usage over time.
Right now, the API console supports a handful of Google APIs (including APIs for Buzz, Translate, Custom Search and five others) with support for more expected soon.