Galaxy of Emptiness

Yesterday, I was at the Business of API Conference where I ran into some old friends and new friends. Outlined below are some of my notes before I had to run and take off.

The key summary to me highlighted by several, but really brought home by Dave McClure. Your API strategy needs to be in alignment with your Business Strategy. I.e. Your API strategy needs to have your revenue model backed into the APIs.

Oren Michaels, CEO Mashery
Requirements for Successful APIs Infrastructure

- Reporting – who’s doing what?

- Monitoring – proactive ability to throttle or manage users to their appropriate service levels.

- Scalability – need to handle the vastness of the developer network

Twitter – 10x times as much traffic coming via the API than the front door traffic

An Aside from an Intuit employee -

67,000 developers with access to a synch API. Imagine what they will do with a full set of APIs.

Thomas McCarthy Howe, Consultant

A quick primer on generalized anxiety disorders. Hmm.

- Expectation of the worse becomes habitual behavior.

– You do not know how your APIs will be used. Let go.

Round Table Discussion

Quentin Hardy, Forbes
Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services
Michael Jones, Userplane/AOL
Bradley Horowitz, Y!
John Richards, MSFT

Y!
Flickr example, APIs enabled flickr to be distributed by the blogosphere.
Many of the Y! web acquisitions are badging APIs and not deep integration APIs. Badging was not a common practice 5 years, but has become the dominant model.
12-18 months vision – reduces ramp-up costs which distr

AOL
Extend services to 3rd party websites and then drive advertising models.
Moved from a fee model to a free advertising model with revenue share which also creates a need for fraud prevention.
12-18 months vision – many companies will need to move beyond APIs to real API strategy with monetization

Amazon
265,000 users in the web services community
Developers were already scrapping the data from the website to build sites which would send traffic back to Amazon.
Cost following model used to developing pricing for the web services.
12-18 months vision – radically reduces ramp-up costs

Asha Vellakial
Telco 2.0 – under attack from disruptive services and governmental regulations
Open APIs have concerns for Telcos such as risk to the billing relationship with the customer.
BT is the leader with APIs
Bobbletop – news aggregator
Wants more Open APIs from aggregator companies. I followed up with here afterwards. I’m still not quite sure what she meant by this other than the telco content experience should be more open.

David Cancel, former CTO Compete
6 months of open apis was greater than 6 years of marketing

Jia Shen, Rockyou
Positioned as the Social Platform API
Facebook is 7x the growth of Myspace – this is the seond time in a week to see that message. Look to see more direct comparisons of social networks going forward.

Dave McClure, former head o PayPal developer network
7 habits of highly successful developer programs
- audience – get one.
- product – better be cool, code examples in cool languages
- geeks – hire geeks, extroverted blogging geeks
- metrics – most important thing – “have some”
- biz model – api must have the business model built-in
- education – make it free and easily accessible
- marketing – sell the developers – give them respect