How API's have changed the 'net

When we went to the Future of Web Apps conference a while back everyone was raving about API’s – “You must build an API” we were told. I had no idea how much of an impact they were going to make.

Online store buy.com has just launched an eBay rival, and they’re making a go of it via a Facebook application. Garage Sale will allow users to advertise items for sale on their Facebook profile pages, with payment via either credit card or pay-pal.

Now if Garage Sale was an independent site you’d be laughing in their face right now, eBay are not going anywhere fast. Utilise the huge Facebook user base however, and suddenly they stand a chance.

Just last month iLike, via their Facebook app, became the fastest growing music sevice on the web with 300,000 new users signing up every day, that just wouldn’t have been possible before.

I think there is a real shift in the way people are thinking about web applications now. Why spend time and money trying to compete against other communities and popular websites by creating your own social network when you can just make use of one that’s already there?

Moo are a great example of this and have practically launched an entire service off the back of the popularity of Flickr. They are now adding support for other photo web apps all the time, further ‘inheriting’ online communities to grow their own user base.

A lot of credit has to go to the developers for opening up their data feeds and those that aren’t are getting left behind – see myspace.com.

It doesn’t even look like Facebook have quite finished yet – you can now get an RSS feed for all your friends’ status updates – very Twitter-esque.

The question is will the success of the Facebook API turn it into a development platform in its’ own right… or has it already?