Object network

The Object Network. The Object Network: Making Mashups Easy. This guest post comes from Duncan Cragg a consultant, writer, speaker and ‘coding architect’ specialising in REST/JSON integration at ThoughtWorks (UK).

You may have seen the statistics and chart on this site showing that the number of APIs is taking off like crazy. There is clearly an enormous and increasing demand for data. It's interesting to compare the current growth of Web APIs with the early growth of the Web itself.

To save you jumping those links: the Web dramatically beats the APIs. I believe that the most likely cause of such relatively slow growth (in what should be a booming ecosystem) is that each API forms a closed silo and cannot benefit from any network effects. Every API is different and there are no links between them.