Testing the business boundaries of APIs

One feature of Web 2.0 sites is the opportunity for others to piggy-back on the functionality or content in order to build new services that the original owners hadn’t contemplated or didn’t want to pursue. So for example someone interested in running a music website (err, for instance me) can sign up to the Amazon Web Services which will allow them to perform searches on the Amazon product database and display the results on their own website, etc. The theory is that Amazon increases it’s visibility to those interested in buying, whilst the music website doesn’t need to worry about building a huge database and can get commission payments without being involved in the messy e-commerce business. You might also have come across talk about mashups (I’ll be posting about some new mashup tools in the near future), these use similar technologies.

Much of the focus has been about on what the functionality of each service offers and how that can be used by third parties. Recently though there have been reminders about the limits  from a business perspective. Amazon has moved against Alexaholic/Statsaholic and Zlio as it felt that in both cases they broke the terms of the agreement. I’m sure that some in the American Congress are regretting how some of the government data is now being brought together. It’s that much harder to prevent it though when the ‘public interest’ is involved.

APIs, Web 2.0

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