“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.”
Although the original context was ridicule, these pearls of wisdom from Sir Isaac have provided the basic foundation of how we conduct business today. Last week Facebook opened its platform up for developers, giving them access to their user community of roughly 20 million. The bigger technology companies have already been leveraging from this and have been developing applications for Facebook for a while. A comprehensive list of approved applications can be found here (you might need to be logged in as a Facebook user to access this).
And only two days ago, Yahoo! announced that it will be opening up its Panama platform to developers as well. For Yahoo!, this is a good way to try and catch up with Google and for third party developers like you and I, it is a good way to gain visibility by standing on the shoulder of giants.
Is this a trend towards computing utopia? Did somebody say “Web 3.0″? A kumbaya world where everyone codes together and shares group hugs. Hmmm…I’m beginning to like this power of collaboration thing. This is great. If I have a product or service to sell, not only can I market to a readymade user-community of 20 million users, I can even customize my advertising and track ad campaign effectiveness. Not too shabby.
Please feel free to leave comments if you have worked with either of the 2 APIs. I would love to know more about the pros/cons of developing using these APIs. And if you have not, what are you waiting for…go ahead, climb on top.
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