Half-a-billion users don't mean API payola

API's are not for making money

API's are for allowing things to communicate easily.

Money is for slowing this process down and shrinking the information economy.

Zuckeburg makes money out of attracting 500million users to his site. He could charge for people to use that - and everyone would move somewhere else.

No one would be stupid enough to invoice you for every nut and bolt a car was made from but for some reason they think the internet should work that way. Cant make my mind up whether is greed, criminal stupidity or the desperation of ignorance.

Nobody ever wrote open source software to get rich

However, there does seem to be a bunch of companies open-sourcing things for hard to understand reasons.

Still too much technobabble

API this and mindshare that and cloud leveraged synergies the other.

Look at your bank balance. If the number is black and getting bigger, then you're making money. Otherwise you're losing money.

It really is that simple, and if you don't get it, don't worry: sooner or later, your bank manager will sit you down and explain it to you.

URL shortening

Not from my clients' sites.

All those are blocked because you have no idea if you're going to end up on a malware page or not.

Back in the good ol' days, open source was written by the end-users. Need a print system? Use open source and modify it if required. Need a shell, or OS or drivers? ditto.

This works well for large organisations who would otherwise run up large licensing costs or need custom functionality but don't want to write the whole thing from scratch. It also works well for small organisations/people who happen to have the skills.

The idea is that you put in the effort for what is profitable for yourself and leaverage off what others do for themselves. The model just doesn't work as well when you don't need the functionality for yourself at all. It isn't impossible to do, but it is much harder.

Open to create abundance

So, you close to reduce the inherent complexity of the abundance and then reduction falls in scarcity.

I don't see the difference with the old buisness which already made scarcity upon abundance, like shortening the product-life for example.

hrm

what does an api have to do with profit making? are you encouraging closed source api's?

im not sure what that would solve.

If you recall facebook originally didn't want the un-washed masses on it's social network and found itself opening up to the world since that decision obviously wasn't growing the service.

I don't use facebook since I am one of those un-washed masses and now that it's ok for me to join they can kiss my rearend.

If it's anything like myspace they have advertising programs built in. All an API is suppose to do is bring the people to you, it's not to do anything else.

I think that all the hype about social networks doesn't mean payola and that's the moral of the story. If you took a cross section of people from these sites (we've already seen how myspace failed) you would probably be surprised how useless the service is.

Facebook never was a win, facebook will never be a win. They had their plan when the service started that the educated masses would lead to more profit for them and that logic died on the table. Now perhaps eddie the farmers facebook will bring in the $.

Nothing against people with real jobs, facebook sucks.