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Are API’s the New Open Source?
It’s amazing to me the amount of innovation brought on by comapnies opening API’s for developers to tap into. Everything from allowing 3rd party applications to run within your site to API’s that let developers pull all your data and do cool things with it.
It reminds me of the whole Open Source movement, but better. I love Open Source. I use it everyday in my life but if I had to choose between getting a companies source code versus getting that companies data? I’d choose data any day.
- makecheck 17y agoI think what we see these days is confusion, where APIs are trying to take over what has traditionally been handled by protocols and file formats. I prefer that APIs actually do things, such as calculations, or composite actions that would be awkward to perform individually. (Yes, APIs can exist primarily to expose data, too; but I think APIs that do this are wasting time in unnecessary encapsulation; all they really need to do is something simple, like returning the URL of data in a certain format.) If I am looking for only data, it should have a (preferably popular) format, optionally with a protocol to access it using whatever network and/or database. This opens you up to multiple implementations, too: so if it turns out that Social Networking Site Du Jour's API isn't actually the most efficient way to do X, you might find an alternative Y that is better, but could use the same data. APIs are also not good for data for the same reason that APIs can be a problem for code: instability. You can't be sure what languages will remain supported, and when things will change. You have to wait for an API to do X, even if it might have been possible given the "raw" data. And ultimately, a company could go out of business and leave your API unusable, whereas actual data can be copied to avoid this, and cached for performance.
- WeslyMichel 17y agoI agree. From a startup standpoint we are able to decrease a lot of expenses by simply utilizing public API's. The advantages of open source code for companies meant that you didn't have to go out and purchase software. We are seeing the same thing with API's. The only problem I see with this trend is the dependency of those API's. With open source software such as PHP & MYSQL once I have it installed, I own it, where API's are real time dependency i.e twitter going down, will cause twitter dependent applications to go down as well. As as a developer myself the value proposition is that the data is also available with the API.