The document summarizes the state of open APIs in 2010. Some key points include:
- Open APIs have grown rapidly in recent years, with over 2,400 APIs listed by 2010 compared to just 105 in 2000. Growth has accelerated.
- Successful APIs have a business model baked in, are easy to adopt, and provide good developer support. Common models include pay-per-use, affiliate marketing, and software as a service.
- REST has become more popular than SOAP due to its simplicity. JSON is also growing as an alternative to XML.
- Major tech companies are increasingly dependent on APIs, with billions of API calls per day powering services like Facebook and Amazon.
12. API business models Best practice: Bake your business model into your API Who What How Amazon Associates Retail Affiliate Model Amazon S3 Infrastructure Pay-as-you-go eBay Auctions APIs for listings Exact Target Bulk Email Tiered pricing Rhapsody Music Partnerships Salesforce.com CRM / SFA SaaS per-seat licenses
13. APIs as biz-dev enabler (aka Bizdev 2.0) “ Decentralized business development” -Toni Schneider Consumer/Hacker Business/Partner Flickr API
14. API Billionaires Club 5 billion API calls / day (April 2010) 1.1 billion API-delivered stories / month (March 2010) 5 billion API calls / day (October 2009) 8 billion API calls / month (Q3 2009) 3 billion API calls / month (March 2009) 3 billion API calls / day, 75% of all traffic (April 2010) Over 50% of all traffic via API (March 2008) Over 100 billion objects stored in S3 (March 2010)
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17. REST vs. SOAP: Simplicity wins again Distribution of API protocols and styles Based on directory of 2,300 web APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb, November 2010
18. REST vs. SOAP, more of both, but a lot more REST Total number of APIs based on protocol and style Based on directory of 2,300 web APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb, November 2010
20. JSON Rising: 45% of all new APIs support JSON Percentage of new APIs with JSON support 197 APIs are now JSON-only, including Facebook Graph, Etsy, and Twitter’s Streaming API Based on directory of 2,300 web APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb, November 2010
21. OAuth picking up steam 20% of all “Social” APIs now with OAuth support 120+ APIs with OAuth support
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23. APIs growing up: versioning & other best practices Old Twitter http://twitter.com/users/show/noradio.xml New Twitter http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/noradio.xml
26. API monitoring: don’t let this happen to you via http://monitor.programmableweb.com …
27. APIs are the glue of SaaS Internal Apps & Systems Customize Integrate API Internal App: web/desktop Traditional Platform Customize Integrate API SaaS App SaaS Service Firewall
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29. 1 API can support 100’s of devices Source: Michael Hart, Netflix
30. Mobile explosion is driving API explosion Source: NPR Pageview growth: NPR.org vs NPR mobile
31. API as Product When an API is not an extension of your product, but it is your product
34. Have we seen this before? 1995 Why do we need a Web site? 2000 2005 2010 Of course we have a Web site Of course we have an API Why do we need an API?