I just went through all the APIs in my monitoring system looking for a diverse set of them to showcase in an API economy story I'm working on, and while I can point to some pretty exciting milestones along the history of APIs, I predict the future will be very boring. Think about the web between the first dot.com bubble burst and the web 2.0 years, that kind of boring--less money going around, but everybody is doing it.
While looking through APIs there are so many robust, powerful, yet very yawn-worthy APIs in my book when it comes to accounting, marking, sales, and advertising. There are slow moving, the universe expanding API offerings coming out of mapping, satellite, and drone APIs. Banking, healthcare, insurance, and other similar areas are steadily talking about the benefits of APIs. On, and on, and on, across almost every industry.
I can't keep pace with the number of companies publishing press releases that mention their APIs, as well as the increased volume of patents which mention APIs--almost all of which do not showcase their APIs publicly on their websites. Everybody seems to be doing APIs, but the singular grand vision of public APIs that many people still seem to associate with the concept has failed by the measure of the tech blogosphere and the VC in-crowd. Everybody is doing APIs, will be doing APIs, and it is becoming too widespread to have a properly hyped conversation about--it is just something you do.
Thankfully I am pretty ADD / OCD, and love sifting through the mundane, the yawn-worthy, looking for the gems that are worth showcasing. Every once in a while I'll find some ground shaking movement and tremors, and the occasionally critical API initiatives, but most of it will just be the very boring, business as usual, like we saw after the early days of the web--remember, APIs are just the next step in the evolution of the web.
