Web 2.0 Summit: Leading Players Facing Challenges, Push for Open APIs and Platforms

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My take on the Web 2.0 Summit last week:

web2.wsj2.com/web_20_summit_leading_players_facing_challe...

Strategies for Creating Open Web Sites and Platforms

As culled from Web 2.0 Summit discussions and other known best practices...

1. Liberate content and services via a public, open API. Content will continue to be separated from the experiences that mediate access to it, this makes adaptable experiences possible. Example: RSS readers let users consume content in the ways they choose and have control over. Doing this turns your Web application into a platform and is one of the most important habits of highly effective Web sites .
2. Syndicate as well as use Web services to open up data. Each method has clear strengths such as discoverability, ease of consumption, or on-demand control. Example: This means RSS or Atom as well as REST or SOAP.
3. Make it legal to reuse content. Don't charge if you can help it, consider monetizing it via advertising, transaction fees, or subscriptions. Don't cripple unintended uses, such as Yahoo!'s limits on their APIs, vs. Amazon's profitable emphasis on unlimited use.
4. Diligently build trust and credibility. No one will use your open data or services unless there is trust and credibility in the site. This is very hard to establish and is easily lost. This is one of the hardest intangibles of openness to manage.
5. Expect the unexpected. Opening up a site means that others will dream of ways of using your data and services in ways you couldn't imagine. Often this means they'll use it as a free resource to achieve something that wasn't possible before in terms of scale or volume. Be prepared for extreme situations and be sure to monitor your feeds and open services and be prepared to throttle them for mailicous or inadvertant waste.

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Web 2.0 Summit: Leading Players Facing Challenges, Push for Open APIs and Platforms

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