Tomorrow at 10am is the great Open API event, hosted by N-TEN. You can follow along Friday, October 20, at 10:00 am Pacific time. You can listen in by calling 866-740-1260 and entering the passcode 3979000.
Now that the formalities are out of the way, I want to get down to business. I'm wondering if all this talk about open API's is just a bunch of Web 2.0 mumbo-jumbo coming out of vendor's mouths just to keep their clients feeling like they're part of the hip Web crowd...and helping keep clients calm once they realize how potentially difficult it is (pre-open APIs) to share data outside the vendor's silos.
In fact, I wonder if any of the vendors participating in this discussion tomorrow can explain how it's in their best interest to make it easier for organizations to share data between different applications. All the talk and quotes I've seen on the N-TEN blog seem to be talking about the great benefits that non-profits would get from open API's, but without there being a fiscal or competitive benefit for a company to invest time and energy into building these APIs, I'd say I'm skeptical as to exactly who, and how quickly , entrenched vendors will be opening up their databases for others to access remotely.
Yeah, Flickr, Google Maps, and others have shown the value of open APIs. But they win using open APIs for a different reason: they become "stickier". In the pay-for-service model that all of these vendors follow, open APIs would seem to make accounting departments' heads spin.
I'm very interested to see who talks the talk, and who walks the walk tomorrow.
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