In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, John Musser talked about Open APIs, their history, their current status and trends. He also talked about what makes an Open API successful, the business models behind them and some related technological details.
Watch: Open APIs: State of the Market (57 min.)
John organized his session on the following outline:
- The big picture – a presentation of what Open APIs are and who are the major players
- The business of APIs – what makes a good Open API and what business models are used out there
- Design and technology – web services accessed via REST (63%), SOAP (22%), others.
- Issues – business and technical dependencies, lack of SLAs, copyright issues, authentication and authorization, privacy, etc.
- Trends – moving toward standardization, lightweight services
The ingredients of a successful API are:
- The underlying service – no matter how good the API is, it will not be adopted if the service provided is bad
- A plan and a business model
- Simple, open, easily adopted
- Providing choices
- Good developer support
John also presented some of the existing successful business models like:
- Amazon S3 – Pay-as-you-go
- eBay - APIs for listings
- Facebook - Pixel sharing
The session ended with John answering questions from the audience.
