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>An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful.

>An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful. This is a bad thing. Replacing opens standards with proprietary APIs locked behind access tokens hardly makes the internet more accessible. Walled gardens are great for making money though…

garry 12y ago
The alternative to known and published APIs is no API, not closed APIs. In general the API companies we do fund are of the open sort and they accomplish something useful in the real world, eg Lob, EasyPost, Hellosign.
- anon1385 12y ago
  There is no such thing as an open web API. They are all proprietary alternatives to open data formats or protocols. If those companies used open and standard data formats or protocols (I admit that in many cases this might mean proposing a new standard) there would be no need for a custom API at all. Standard data formats can still exist behind a paywall, so it's not an issue of free-as-in-beer. It's an issue of user lockin. For a bunch of things it won't matter one way or the other because not many people will ever use it, and there isn't much likelihood of other organisations offering the same data anyway. Take Google Reader API though, where we ended up with a bunch of clients that only targeted the proprietary Google Reader API. When Reader shut down clients had to be rewritten to work with the APIs of other RSS syncing services, services had to try and recreate the Reader API to ease migration and so on. All to arrive at a situation that isn't much better than before - a bunch of clients hard coded to specific services that will have to be altered if those services go away. If Reader had been based on an open protocol then switching would have been trivial for everybody - you just point your client at the address of your new rss syncing server. I want a world where switching between providers and clients is trivial(ish), like email, rss or the web itself, not a world like Google Reader where we are all hard coded into proprietary APIs that are one cost-cutting meeting away from being closed, leaving everybody with a lot of work to do to migrate. I'm sure there is less opportunity to make money that way - you can't lock people in as easily and so on. However it's not like most of the companies we are talking about here are ever going to be profitable. The game is about getting bought out. I'd rather we at least create something a bit more lasting while we play the buyout lottery.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    If a data format is open, startups can still provide proprietary metadata & analytics, which could be distributed via API. The presence of open data would encourage startups to define a common, open API. The challenge is convincing startups that they should invest limited resources into building an ecosystem, instead of a walled garden.
thinkingkong 12y ago
I think you might be confusing the "scrapability" with openness. If the information was behind a login / paywall to begin with, whats the harm in needing a token to access that API?
- anon1385 12y ago
  I have to admit I'm a bit more cynical. Sure somethings are just private/charged for etc and access tokens are just part of a paywall. That is fair enough. I think in a lot of cases it's really about control though. Information that isn't behind a paywall, but that requires a token to access through the API. The classic example would be Twitter, when they shut down most of the third party clients. There is of course a decent argument that it's their service and they can put whatever T&C on it that they like. However YC didn't seem to care about T&C when they funded AirBNB and defended their (ab)use of Craigslist.

garry 12y ago

The alternative to known and published APIs is no API, not closed APIs. In general the API companies we do fund are of the open sort and they accomplish something useful in the real world, eg Lob, EasyPost, Hellosign.

anon1385 12y ago
There is no such thing as an open web API. They are all proprietary alternatives to open data formats or protocols. If those companies used open and standard data formats or protocols (I admit that in many cases this might mean proposing a new standard) there would be no need for a custom API at all. Standard data formats can still exist behind a paywall, so it's not an issue of free-as-in-beer. It's an issue of user lockin. For a bunch of things it won't matter one way or the other because not many people will ever use it, and there isn't much likelihood of other organisations offering the same data anyway. Take Google Reader API though, where we ended up with a bunch of clients that only targeted the proprietary Google Reader API. When Reader shut down clients had to be rewritten to work with the APIs of other RSS syncing services, services had to try and recreate the Reader API to ease migration and so on. All to arrive at a situation that isn't much better than before - a bunch of clients hard coded to specific services that will have to be altered if those services go away. If Reader had been based on an open protocol then switching would have been trivial for everybody - you just point your client at the address of your new rss syncing server. I want a world where switching between providers and clients is trivial(ish), like email, rss or the web itself, not a world like Google Reader where we are all hard coded into proprietary APIs that are one cost-cutting meeting away from being closed, leaving everybody with a lot of work to do to migrate. I'm sure there is less opportunity to make money that way - you can't lock people in as easily and so on. However it's not like most of the companies we are talking about here are ever going to be profitable. The game is about getting bought out. I'd rather we at least create something a bit more lasting while we play the buyout lottery.
- walterbell 12y ago
  If a data format is open, startups can still provide proprietary metadata & analytics, which could be distributed via API. The presence of open data would encourage startups to define a common, open API. The challenge is convincing startups that they should invest limited resources into building an ecosystem, instead of a walled garden.

thinkingkong 12y ago

I think you might be confusing the "scrapability" with openness. If the information was behind a login / paywall to begin with, whats the harm in needing a token to access that API?

anon1385 12y ago
I have to admit I'm a bit more cynical. Sure somethings are just private/charged for etc and access tokens are just part of a paywall. That is fair enough. I think in a lot of cases it's really about control though. Information that isn't behind a paywall, but that requires a token to access through the API. The classic example would be Twitter, when they shut down most of the third party clients. There is of course a decent argument that it's their service and they can put whatever T&C on it that they like. However YC didn't seem to care about T&C when they funded AirBNB and defended their (ab)use of Craigslist.