radar.oreilly.com — Nat Torkington offers some advice for those building their business on top of the "free" APIs offered by companies like Google and Amazon: relying solely on those APIs is potentially dangerous, should the company start to restrict access to those services. As Nat says: "there's no such thing as a free API if you're looking to build a business."
Apr 27, 2007 View in Crawl 4
tikozApr 28, 2007
Duggmirror, for example.. yea it doesn't use the digg api but still it built a business over digg.
Closed AccountApr 28, 2007
Digg is relying solely on the internets, bad business move right there. The internets will never take off.
Closed AccountApr 28, 2007
Next big fad, mashed potatoes.
doctorcalApr 28, 2007
Danger of relying on free APIs?Wrong. It's the danger of relying on a *proprietary* API.This is a very old business risk manifested in a new way. As mentioned in several places above, when your business relies on deploying software on a proprietary OS, you have some risk of future releases of the OS failing to adhere to that "contract", and breaking your application. What the web-based model does is add immediacy to the formula: you are "running on" what the host has deployed, and have no control whatsoever over when changes to the API occur.The allure of these platforms is strong - it's pretty easy to implement and deploy "applications" that take advantage of some really nifty features, but those features are provided at a great cost.
jorgegtApr 28, 2007
Yeah but one should follow the market. If your client has windows already deployed, chances are that he doesn't want to change. The good thing is that nowadays there are new alternatives like virtualization and web based services, two ways I consider a good way to gain interoperability
streakApr 28, 2007
Anybody using MySQL or SleepyCat's DB?(@rune420, I believe all Windows licenses are for a fee)
Closed AccountApr 28, 2007
"build a business off someone else's API?""Duggmirror, for example.. yea it doesn't use the digg api but still it built a business over digg."I wouldn't really consider Duggmirror as a business, it's more a service - If Digg didn't exist, there'd be no need for Duggmirror, where as something like <a class="user" href="http://www.statsaholic.com/">http://www.statsaholic.com/</a> is a more a business that *should* be independent of any other service, since it's pretty much mooching of say, Alexia, without providing them anything - Whereas duggmirror is not only providing Digg users with a good service, it's also free's Digg's developers from having to implement such a (fairly difficult to implement) feature
silverrocketMay 3, 2007
Speaking of Google API's, I just integrated it into an online app (sort of as a 'neat extra feature') and was amazed to discover that the quality/accuracy of the API is light years behind the Google Maps website itself. The difference is the GPS provider. The Google API's versions of some Canadian addresses are so terrible, I'm considering removing the 'feature' from the site.