BROOMFIELD, Colo. – Growth, simplicity and money are driving open application programmable interfaces, said John Musser of Programmable Web. Open APIs are becoming increasingly popular, and the growth rate of open APIs is getting steeper, Musser told the audience in an opening keynote at today’s Glue Conference.
Programmable Web has 3,200 open APIs today. It took the company more thaneight years to get to 1,000 open APIs, but only 18 months to get to 2,000 open APIs and a mere nine months to reach the 3,000 mark, Musser said.
The top categories for open APIs are Internet, social networking and mapping.
While simplicity rules in APIs, the business models are becoming more complex, Musser noted. In 2005, business models centered on free, revenue shares, paying the developer directly and indirect methods of payment. Today, those remain the largest categories but there is a new level of sophistication around each of those models. The growing popularity of APIs can be underscored by news in news story that noted Qwerly, a people search engine, was quitting its profile pages in favor of its growing API business, Musser said.
Glue Conference: Open APIs growing and growing up
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