APIs : a strong barrier to entry

Despite most of people think, building APIs to access to your web-service, or more generaly, opening your application so that people can interract with it through other services is probably one of the key success factors. Twitter is the best example of this.

Twitter’s API traffic outreach the website’s traffic 10 times. Yes, 10 times. More impressive, Twitter’s updates from the actual Twitter.com counts for slightly more than 50%, which also means that Twitter would nearly be used twice as less if other clients could not connect to it! The pattern of clients used to update a twitter status is clearly a “long tail” pattern : the cost of having a new client for twitter is close to 0, but the actual “value” of twitter resides as much in these than in the web!

In twitter’s case, it’s clear that the service would have never be even closely as successful without these APIs, and it makes a ton of sense. The goal of any webservice provider is that user actually use the service, not that they use the service on a specific website! The consequences are multiple, one of them being a strong decoupling between the application itself and the “presentation” layers : webservice providers should now concentrate on the actual “engine” and provides powerful APIs so that external “designer” can create the best suited interface!

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