I have had the first blog post for API Evangelist from September of 2010 up for the last week pondering what my headspace was like in that moment, as well as what has changed. I would say the technology of APIs hasn’t changed much, but the business and politics of APIs has dramatically changed, making it a different world, with entirely different reasons for why API matter—with the following highlights.
- Balance - There was a balance between API producers and consumers back in the day—us developers believed we could truly build something interesting and useful and potentially make money along the way, and it was something API producers invested in.
- Access - APIs were a lot more accessible back then, both in a technical sense, but also a business sense—-I could afford to use many different APIs, without the ladder being pulled up from me as a small business owner, which has moved out of reach today.
- Community - There was a much stronger developer community building things back then who believed in the API economy, which doesn’t exist today in any human sense, and is more about the business of APIs with only a facade of technology to keep the real intent obfuscated.
- Business - The business of APIs has shifted from producing useful resources and capabilities and charging for usage to the casino version that investors prefer, where companies are what you are betting upon and the APIs are secondary to the real business value.
- Simplicity - Simplicity and intuitive APIs mattered before and they do not now, with APIs being all about scale, performance, access at all costs, without any consideration for design, craft, or a wider understanding, keeping things accessible to those with resources.
I am fascinated by my friends who declare AI will make things more accessible and democratized than APIs. Without even an acknowledgement of the resources you need to operate AI versus API, let alone the impact on the environment. People approach AI without even any awareness of who and how AI is being wielded or of the resistance to AI that exists in this moment. I am dead serious that I see the move from API to AI as simply entropy and decay at scale of the API economy. Money and power has corrupted the API economy since 2010, and there is a lot less humanity in what we do.
