I’m doing my usual monitoring of the API space, and while looking at various developer areas, I stumbled across the Target Developer Portal. I find the Target developer portal interesting because it is publicly available, but before you can get any information you have to register or login.
When you land on the landing page for developer.target.com you simple get a page that says:
Please Note: Access to the developer portal is restricted to Target employees and trusted third parties that currently have a working relationship with Target Corporation. Registration requests that do not meet these guidelines will be rejected.
I would like to see more information about Target’s API efforts, which I think they could do without giving away business intelligence, but overall I support the line they are walking with their API efforts. To me, Target is making a statement that they have an API, and if you are "Target employees and trusted third parties", you can get more access--it is a start, so I'm hopeful.
I'm part of many private API discussions lately, where I’m trying to educate companies about the benefits of being more public, and I think we’ll see more companies take targets approach to publishing their developer API portal in coming years.
My only hope is that more of them will also share a blog, and other details about what they are up to, and hopefully some day even some publicly available APIs providing access to information that is already available on their website.
