It’s really not that hard. I ran a site for many years that interfaced with hundreds of different sites. It could be as simple as not actively thwarting crawle

It’s really not that hard. I ran a site for many years that interfaced with hundreds of different sites. It could be as simple as not actively thwarting crawlers. Or in your example, they provide everything they have as an API and it’s up to the competitors to adapt to whatever features they provide. In which case, other companies can focus on the lowest common denominator and making that interoperable. It’s not perfect or seamless, but the baseline isn’t that hard, and that’s good enough for most people. And it’s funny you bring up messaging, for many years it was interoperable across many services via XMPP and it worked pretty well, until everyone decided it was in their competitive best interest to silo it. We really haven’t gained much in terms of innovation in that space since then, in many ways it’s much worse.