APIs that I love

Two recent announcements by the Big Boys on their APIs really got me excited about the possibilities. The first is by Best Buy. If you are keen to find out more, the below links should serve as a good research point:

1. Open Beats Closed: Best Buy's new API: The o'reilly team discusses how open beats close and why other big companies should follow sue
2. The API bugs hits old retail and old media: An NYtimes article descibling the API trend among the more 'traditional' businesses
3. The API itself: All the documentation you need to start coding.
   

The second one? Netflix of course. Again, some references if you need to catch up on the reading:

1. NetFlix API, What it will and will not do: A layman description of what the Netflix API can enable.
   
2. 5 business ideas built around Netflix API: a fun discussion on some of the business opportunties. A couple of them are actually interesting and might even make a little money
3. The API itself:
   

These annoucements reminded me that Mybloglog API remains unexploited. Joe Lazarus has a great post on why it is important (see link).

In fact, I was so convinced about what Joe was saying that we invested in such a startup. They loved the idea that an digital object on a blog including music, news, books, events, photos et al can be influenced by your community is powerful and ran with it. Unfortunately, in the course of their development they ran into problems with the API's T&Cs of non-commercial use.

As we are toying around ideas on how to solve this issue, we hit upon another scenario. Is it possible to replace mybloglog users with people from any other social services? Twitter users on your blog? How about Facebook or Last.fm. This seem like an interesting avenue to explore and I wish them best of luck in doing so.

As APIs started to be used more and more, I believe all interesting services will be created. If you know of other APIs or interesting applications, do drop me a comment!

Posted in: Personal