Comments on: API Only Services?

By: Joseph Scott’s Blog » Blog Archive » Amazon S3 - Online Storage

Joseph Scott’s Blog » Blog Archive » Amazon S3 - Online Storage — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:36:30 +0000

[...] Instead of launching this as an app first and then coming out with APIs, this is an API only service. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. I wrote about the idea of API only services back in July 2005. Amazon obviously has a huge amount of back end resources already to keep their current web offerings up, so focus on what you do well and create and API that allows others to build apps on top of it. [...]

By: Mashable* » BunchBall and the Universal Blog Widget

Mashable* » BunchBall and the Universal Blog Widget — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 02:47:25 +0000

[...] In this increasingly distributed world, websites need to become web services, spreading themselves right out to the edges of the network. In this case, the edge is largely made up of MySpace pages, social-networking sites and blogs. The widget, meanwhile, is the blog equivalent of the API – and the more you give away, the more you get back. (Incidentally, Scoble once referred to widgets as Internet Connected Components, raising some interesting discussions.) Flickr, YouTube, Stickam, del.icio.us, Revver and many more Web 2.0 players have successfully employed widgets to drive traffic back to their own sites. eBay and Amazon take the next step by incentivizing their widgets (you earn a % of any transaction). And finally there’s the widget to end all widgets: the indefatigable Google Adsense. Ultimately, I wonder whether we even need to drive traffic back to the originating site – it seems feasible to have all the interaction taking place within the widget itself (and in fact this already happens with Adsense). This is similar to Joseph Scott’s idea for API-only services, and you could argue that Stickam and Bunchball are getting pretty close. Nonetheless, you still need a centralized site where the user can create his widgets (or do you?). [...]

By: Jacek

Jacek — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:08:48 +0000

apart from paying for such services, which has been a known problem for a long time now, there are also privacy concerns here. Outsourcing many seemingly simple things like spellcheck can have interesting consequences – would you like spellcheck.example.com to see everything you write on some textbox here and there or in your local editor?

I didn’t think so. 8-)

By: Al

Al — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 08:28:16 +0000

You want a killer service? US Sales Tax calculation. The government expects it’s citizens to pay correct taxes. The only way to calculate correct taxes sucks. It sucks really, really hard. I want the @#$&*%! government to publish a ->>> FREE

By: fame

fame — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:05:05 +0000

webservices

Whenever I read API on some website, I get interested. I like to integrate, I really do. Especially when it comes to “cool” things, like flickr, or anything Google puts out. Here is an interesting read: Api only webservices? Discovered…

By: DarrenDelaye.com » API-First Services: Be Your Own #1 API Client

DarrenDelaye.com » API-First Services: Be Your Own #1 API Client — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 23:30:33 +0000

[...] Joseph Scott talks about API Only Services and whether it would be possible to have a really specialized API that wouldn’t have a web application of its own. I love that people are exposing more and more APIs to get to the data on their sites that otherwise would have to be painfully screen-scraped to be useful to other web sites, but I would suggest an alternative path to building good APIs from here on out. [...]

By: Kyle Mulka

Kyle Mulka — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 05:50:15 +0000

Hmm… now someone just needs to find a way to pay for these services. Advertising probably isn’t going to work here. Micropayments are the new way to do this I belive. I think Google is working on something like that, and PayPal better be working on something or it will miss out.