Joe McKendrick points out an uncomfortable reality about web 2.0 and published APIs, namely that there arent that many of them relative to the number of web sites that could be offering them. This is something that we faced at Teqlo, which of course is built on the premise that these services exist and provide functionality that is useful.
Bob, however, cites ZDNet blogging colleague Dion Hinchcliffes own calculations about the actual number of APIs and mashups currently in existence, which dont suggest the revolution is at hand anytime soon. Dion had stated in a recent post, that as of December 13, 2006 there were 348 APIs registered and 1,350 mashups.
We have been in the process of building some applications as part of an effort to not just prime the pump but also learn through actual experience what it takes to build applications that are composites of third party services. We hit a wall when we speced out an app that scoured sales leads off popular networking sites, liked Linkedin and Jigsaw. The problem was that these services dont have APIs to take advantage of, and that was a big roadblock but fortunately for us an opportunity to try out something we had been watching for a while, OpenKapow.With OpenKapow you can turn any website into a REST service and what that means for us is that we can turn anything into a component in our network that can be used in any our user generated mashups, such as the one in the screenshot below which features a Linkedin service component generated by OpenKapow. It was remarkably easy to generate and has been very reliable.
Joe is right to highlight the API shortage but rest assured, no pun intended, there are options for generating reliable REST services.
Technorati Tags: openkapow, REST, Teqlo
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