- Api’s are great, they allow companies to expose parts of their engine for inclusion into the products of others to increase adoption and to facilitate the development of features and products around a common set of data.
In theory Api’s are a win-win, both for the party that exposes the Api as well as for the party that uses it and since the mid 90’s Apis have become more and more common.
Api is short for ‘application program interface’. An Api defines a fairly rigid (as in, not changing on a daily basis) boundary where two pieces of software (typically, on the web a service and some client software) meet and where data is exchanged based on certain criteria.
In practice though, Apis are a double edged sword, both for the exposer as well as for the user. In this article I’ll try to outline what the shadowside is of exposing an Api, and why this is a potential problem for any users of that Api.
I've been thinking about APIs recently and how they are used often as the basis of a business. Many companies have been launched which are based solely on the data coming from another company through an API (think Twitter and Facebook). Some branched out and survived the inevitable clash with the hand that feeds them, but I wonder how much each of them made before they were forced to look elsewhere. Guys like Paul Graham who invest in tech startups spend a lot of money in a bunch of different companies because they know that even if 99/100 of them fail they will more than recoup their investment with the 1/100 that doesn't. I wonder if one could make a company that specialized in making products with the APIs of other companies but had enough of variety that they could survive most of them cutting them off.