Reflecting on Progress in the API Economy

This week we had the pleasure of heading to Seoul for the WWW conference and first stop was a great API Meetup hosted by Daum DNA at D. Camp. Great audience and myself an Mike Amundsen we’re on speaking duty. The event flyer is here.

For the event I was asked to prepare an overview of the current state of APIs and the API Economy, which is a daunting task – John Musser’s great presentations (here and here) are hard to follow, so I didn’t try. Instead, it was a nice chance to put together some thoughts and we came up with a slightly different view of the ecosystem. Key take-aways from our thoughts (the presentation is embedded below):

• The number of APIs is clearly growing rapidly – but it is increasingly difficult for directories to keep up, and many of these APIs are private or semi-private.

• Some clear use-cases for APIs have emerged and many companies are combining them to suit their business.

Progress in the API Economy - April 2014 from 3SCALE

• At the technology level we have workable tools for much of the provision of individual APIs but ecosystem challenges such as discovery, copyright, standards adoption are starting to become more pressing.