Today, I am meeting Oren Michels, the Founder and CEO of Mashery. Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Ebay was the first company to launch an API back in 2001. Since then, the adoption growth has been pretty slow, until social networks like Facebook and Twitter started to play the open data game. The release of the Google Maps API also catapulted a number of new mashup projects.
To prepare the interview with Oren, I have studied Mashery’s background a little bit (the job of a reporter). My researches started with Sexywidget‘s insightful review of last week’s API conference. The blog’s author Lawrence Coburn details the 6 different existing business model that can be applied with an API. A click away from this article, on ZDnet, Dion Hinchcliffe offers a complete understanding of the evolution of APIs, and explains why it has become essential for any web-based company to consider building an API.
Yet another click away, John Musser of ProgrammableWeb celebrates the 1,000th API of ProgrammableWeb’s API list. Since ProgrammableWeb tracks all those different APIs, it is able to deliver serious metrics on APIs’ usage:
Finally, the team from Social Web TV brings us this punchy little video (at the top of this article), where John McCrea invites Clay Loveless, Mashery’s chief architect, to participate to the show:
The Web is going Social, and the Social Web is going open, I see Mashery’s fitting in as a logical service layer to that…