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This make me think about something Fred Wilson said at TC Disrupt ... Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your

by iqster 15y ago

This make me think about something Fred Wilson said at TC Disrupt ... Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch. (link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...) I've spent the last few days trying to use the terribly documented (and frequently changing) Facebook API ... and I wonder, why am I putting myself through this abuse? FB is not unique here ... Twitter's APIs are pretty flakey too in terms of how often they fail. It made me realize that my objectives and that of my API's provider are clearly not the same. I love APIs but I'm tired of getting beaten up by them. </rant>

adriand 15y ago
Perhaps there's a SaaS opportunity to build an intermediary API for these other services. It would present a single, sensible, unified API to developers, and would negotiate all of the crappy APIs of other services on the other side. Facebook changes their API? No problem, API Intermediary simply updates its Facebook API calls once, maintaining the same developer-facing API as before. Google Translate gets deprecated? No problem, API Intermediary just switches translation providers to Microsoft. Of course this would be a ton of work to build and maintain, but therein lies the value to others. Because of that, it probably couldn't be free (who would want that headache for nothing?) and it would probably not always offer the full range of capabilities that direct API access would, but it may still be profitable.
- rratkows 15y ago
  I believe there is an opportunity. I believe the biggest hurdle with Enterprise adoption of SaaS is data integration and effectively all SaaS vendors combined are building the tower of babel. We are a SaaS company, we only use SaaS products and we probably have about 15 of them. Some of them integrate because they partner with NetSuite, other are stand alone and that is OK for now but for true Business Intelligence we need them to integrate. Infomatica is doing a booming business, inpart to the SaaS demands.
  - iqster 15y ago
    Interesting... what functionality does Netsuite offer? Sorry ...noob question :p

by iqster 15y ago

adriand 15y ago

Perhaps there's a SaaS opportunity to build an intermediary API for these other services. It would present a single, sensible, unified API to developers, and would negotiate all of the crappy APIs of other services on the other side. Facebook changes their API? No problem, API Intermediary simply updates its Facebook API calls once, maintaining the same developer-facing API as before. Google Translate gets deprecated? No problem, API Intermediary just switches translation providers to Microsoft. Of course this would be a ton of work to build and maintain, but therein lies the value to others. Because of that, it probably couldn't be free (who would want that headache for nothing?) and it would probably not always offer the full range of capabilities that direct API access would, but it may still be profitable.

rratkows 15y ago
I believe there is an opportunity. I believe the biggest hurdle with Enterprise adoption of SaaS is data integration and effectively all SaaS vendors combined are building the tower of babel. We are a SaaS company, we only use SaaS products and we probably have about 15 of them. Some of them integrate because they partner with NetSuite, other are stand alone and that is OK for now but for true Business Intelligence we need them to integrate. Infomatica is doing a booming business, inpart to the SaaS demands.
- iqster 15y ago
  Interesting... what functionality does Netsuite offer? Sorry ...noob question :p