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.
(Yes I realize Open Source is a licensing thing not just a code thing but let me play out my analogy)
API’s also seem more benefitial to everyone involved. By opening up your API, you’re encouraging comapnies to do somethine additive with it, not duplicative to what you’re already doing (which source code lends itself to).
Data is unique. Code seems like a commodity (before my developer friends flog me I see a very real distinction between code and *good* code). You can’t replicate the kind of data that you get from Twitter and Facebook but you could replicate it’s code (as if you’d want to) very easily.
Maybe I’m just being shortsighted because I’m not a developer. What do you think?
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