Posts from Jonothan Boutelle and Josh Porter highlight one of the biggest outstanding problems of Web 2.0, discussed at last night’s BayCHI meeting – as APIs multiply and become better and better, their profitable uses become more and more evident, but no provider of APIs has formally instituted any easy way to do profit sharing. Therefore all the cool API mixing-and-matching (some of my co-workers have a cruder term for this involving copulation) is either done for free, contrary to the terms of service, or after a long series of business negotiations. Won’t someone just put an open, publicly-known price on their stuff? These API remixes are made by hackers, and the hackers I’ve met aren’t bizdev types. Paulo Eduardo Neves, who commented on Boutelle’s post, is exactly right:
They should just put a price tag in it. Something like: if you are making money from this API, you’d have to pay US$0.0001 per access. At least somebody would be able to make a business plan before starting to code.
Side-note: I’m testing out a new blogging tool. If you see this, and it looks normal, hooray!
Side-note to the side-note: Uh, no. First of all, the formatting was suboptimal, with weird line breaks. Second, the ‘tags’ feature automatically promoted a certain company without giving me any choice in the matter. Posts will continue to be made from the WordPress console for now.
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