How web 2.0 killed the internet
last updated: Mar 27, 2024
An Open API is simply a limited, revokable license to access and consume a certain subset of data and/or functionality that belongs to a closed silo. It is a visitor’s pass. The terms of the pass grant you limited access for a specific time. The terms can be altered — and routinely are altered — at the whim of the API owner. This is a painful lesson that many developers learned, for example, while working to add value to the Twitter platform by building Twitter clients. They were unceremoniously dumped after expending their energies to help Twitter build up its closed silo.