Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Going beyond the 350 APIs on Programmable Web

From MashupCamp

Let's address the long tail: only 350 APIs are registered at Programmable Web (maybe 370 by the time of the unconference). Many of these APIs are provided from the same providers (Yahoo, etc.). In this session, let's discuss ways to overcome this limitation and enable programmatic access to any website.

Topics for discussion:

• Why do so few sites have an API? Why 350, and not 350,000?
  • Providing an incentive to content owners to allow / enable programmatic access
  • What business model exists for website owners to provide an API? Without one, APIs don't emerge and those that do are in danger of being revoked at any time (witness Google's recent move with the SOAP Search API).
• Current technical methodologies (working with RSS, writing regular expressions, etc.), their pros and cons
• Emerging technologies like Dapper that enable construction of APIs

Goals:

• To learn how to work with websites that do not have APIs or RSS, or sites where existing APIs are insufficient
• To devise methods to encourage content providers to allow programmatic access of their sites