I had the very good fortune to participate in Union Square Ventures first Sessions event yesterday. The general topic was peer production and peer produced software, and instead of rehashing part of the discussion, I'd like to expand on one particular thought that was briefly touched on during the event. There was some animated talk in the morning about open data architectures. It struck me through the course of the conversation that we have yet to witness (or more accurately, I can't think of any) open architectures that are API only. That is, there's always a there there, no matter how open the system or its components. But we're entering a world in which the variety and number of data formats is growing rapidly. Music meta-data alone will end up having five, ten, fifteen different RSS namespace extensions created for the purpose of providing either community value or some proprietary advantage. It seems as though there will emerge a variety of opportunities to construct API only companies whose sole purpose is to provide transformation and transportation capabilities between various data formats and data stores. Talk about web2.0. A web services company without a web site seems like a very real possibility, and the economic possibilities could be really compelling if you could create a set of frameworks for embedded metering capabilities within the API. There are obviously questions as to whether you would be very successful marketing a collection of API's that didn't "live" anywhere, but ignoring the nasty reality of promotion and awareness for the moment, there are probably some really cool possibilities around API only architectures for processing different stores and formats of peer produced content.
I guess we'll see if anything like this emerges in the next couple years.
My second thought about the discussion yesterday was that I feel like Charlie in . I'm having a momentary set of interesting thoughts which will be followed immediately by obsessing about "how to get more feeds".Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!
Posted by Dick at October 21, 2005 09:44 PM | TrackBack