Back in late October the The Programmable Web quietly reached a milestone as its catalog of web service APIs crossed the 1000 mark.  That may not seem like a significant number but consider that now over 60% of eBay listings come from their APIs which adds up to over 6 billion API calls per month with approximately 70,000 developers in the program and 12,000 third party applications (up from 4,800 in Q1 2007).  Twitter, the free social messaging service, has an API that does 10x the traffic of their website primarily through 3rd party application integration. Facebook launched its Facebook Platform back May 2007 and now has over 52,000 applications with 140 new applications added per day, and back in October 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP for Product Management and Developer Relations, reported that Amazon Web Services were seeing 27,601 transactions per second. These numbers illustration that over the last couple years there has been explosive growth in the use of web API services and the pressure continues to build on software companies to open up their products to third party applications.

Some relief has come as initiatives have been launched to try to standardize these disparate API’s.  Even President-elect Barack Obama is promising to “put government data online in universally accessible formats”.  Google has massed its seemingly inexhaustible set of resources and placed some of them behind the OpenSocial platform to define a common API for social applications across multiple websites.  A bunch of websites have already or are in the process of implementing the OpenSocial platform (e.g. Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo and Salesforce.com).  On the search front, Microsoft just released a re-architected API for Windows Live Search that now supports returning results in the OpenSearch format.  OAuth and OpenID continue to gain popularity as standard methods for authentication and authorization and the Portable Contacts API is trying to provide a standardized way for developers to give their users a secure method to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the web.  And finally, in an attempt to pull all of this together, the Open Web Foundation was announced as OSCON in July to create a place for community-driven specification and to support the notion of “the Web as a platform”.

It’s great to see how the technologies of the web continue to grow and mature at such an incredible rate.  As more and more companies open up and standardize their APIs, our ability to deliver new and compelling services will continue to expand.