5 Reasons APIs Suck

I have spent much of the last few months working with APIs, and the experience has inspired this list of what’s wrong with APIs:

1. Exposing an API makes scaling headaches worse

   Preparing for traffic spikes has always been a challenge on the web, when a single link from Slashdot or Digg can send hordes of traffic your way and bring your site to its knees. Yet the situation is even worse if you offer an API, because the code on the other end accessing your API may be unrelenting in its pinging or simply badly written, hammering your infrastructure harder than human visitors ever could.

2. APIs have no “eyeballs” to “monetize”

   Advertising has long been the lazy man’s substitute for coming up with a real, viable online revenue model. Attract visitors, then just wait for the barrels of money, right? Google’s AdSense and a host of other online advertising tools made it dead-simple to turn visitors into money, if not always much of it. But the “visitors” to your API are other web sites or other services, and even Google hasn’t figured out a way to make a computer interested in seeing an advertisement (yet).

3. The incentives to expose an API are often weak

   Points 1 and 2, taken together, imply that publishing an API can have real costs in terms of bandwidth, servers, support, and administration. At the same time, there is no obvious revenue model through which to recoup these expenses. This reality can discourage people from making useful APIs available, a point which I’ll post more about soon.

4. There is no standard way to access an API

   The battle to standardize access to web services has raged for over a decade, producing no clear victor and leaving a trail of abandoned and aborted proposals in its wake. Supporters of WS-* and REST have an almost reflexive distaste for one another. Your web service architecture might be RESTful, but is it “high REST”, “low REST”, or simply “REST-ish”?

5. APIs are unreliable

   What if an API you rely on is down temporarliy, or, god forbid, permanently? Isn’t it dangerous to build your business on top of a resource controlled by someone else? Users of conventional software packages have contracts or Service Level Agreements to help protect them against these risks. APIs rarely have the types of guarantees offered by other types of hosted software.

Now, I have an admission: I don’t actually think that APIs suck. APIs have made the internet a much more interesting place, promoting the type of remix culture which can really accelerate innovation. APIs also make economic sense, because they encourage specialization and the associated gains from comparative advantage. In non-economic terms, the availability of APIs encourages creators on the internet to focus on what they’re best at, and leverage APIs for the rest of the functionality they need. Yet in order to realize the full value of APIs and services on the web, we’ll have to find solutions to these five problems. Stay tuned for some of my ideas about a path forward.

Tags: api, monetization, rest

This entry was posted on September 15th, 2008 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.