The innovative tagging methodology used by allowed you to pull a list of your tags, or public web bookmarks by using the URL /. Which proved to be a pretty powerful way for cataloging and sharing web links. You can find the seeds of this idea in what Pearson is doing with their product catalog.Īs the publishing world slowly wakes up to digital distribution, APIs will become a common tool in the toolbox of authors and publishers.ĭel. is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks to web pages, that was founded by Jousha Schachter in 2003.ĭel. implemented a very simple tagging system which allowed users to easily tag their web bookmarks in a meaningful way, but also established a kind of folksonomy across all users of the platform. I think in the future, providing default API access to all books will be critical to the syndication across all available distribution platforms. As I do with all my ideas, I will share my thoughts here in real-time as I do the research. But I would envision something like this would work well will existing platforms like Project Gutenberg. My thoughts are still in the idea stage, I have done very little research on what is out there. When I create a book and generate the ePub version, I would like to be able to upload it to a cloud platform, where the service would spider the ePub file and help generate a simple, but meaningful API for the book allowing developers to search, annotate and interact with the books content via web, mobile or tablet applications. In the same spirit of helping data owners generate APIs, I'd like to see the same types of tools, but designed for books and their authors or publishers. The new cloud services like EmergentOne will mount a MySQL database, spider the tables, and generate a web API for you, while providing you the basic tools you will need to manage access and consumption of that API. In the last two years I've seen the emergence of cloud platforms that focus on helping data administrators, owners and stewards, generate APIs from their data sources. Its nice to see API value quantified in engagement, allowing us to move beyond the eye-ball based economy we are drowning in currently. I like the Box $rev model, because it actually incentivizes developers to build meaningful, engaging applications that users will actually adopt. This approach to revenue share won't work for all API providers, but is a great way to incentivize developers when you have a core platform you need to drive new users to.
Offering developers 15% of the revenue generated via the core box platforms makes a lot of sense. You just integrate the Box API into your app, enroll it into the Box $rev program, and box will monitor, track and report your activity-sending you checks for up to 15% of the per seat price as a commission, each quarter.Īs a PaaS provider, the core value driven by the box API is not about making money, it is based upon adding new users, and getting them to depend on box for their everyday needs. In 2013, Mashery was acquired by Intel, helping recently validate that the API industry truly has come of age.īox Opens Up Revenue Sharing For API DevelopersĮnterprise content sharing platform box launched a new developer revenue sharing program for its API developer ecosystem, called $rev.īox $rev is pretty straightforward. The space we all know today was defined by early API commerce pioneers like SalesForce and Amazon, social pioneers like Flickr and Delicous, and from Mashery who helped define what is now known as the business of APIs. It would take almost six more years before the API industry would come of age. Mashery was the first to bring a standard set of services to API providers, that would help set the stage for the future growth of the API industry.
While there were tools for deploying APIs, there was no standard approach to managing your API deployment. It was clear that the world of web APIs was getting real, and there was opportunity for companies to offer API management as a service. In November 2006, API the first API service provider Mashery came out of "stealth mode" to offer documentation support, community management and access control for companies wishing to offer public or private APIs-from blog post in TechCrunch titled API Management Service is Open for Business.Īt this point in time, in 2006, we were moving from the social period of APIs into the cloud computing phase with the introduction of Amazon Web Services.