Okay, now I’m pretty sure that APIs, combined with some mix of RSS/JSON + AJAX, really are emerging as the defining technology of the web.
I’m still trying to piece it all together because it seems like a lot of this stuff is really intelligently heading toward some kind of unification. There’s no doubt an elegance to its evolution. If laissez-faire economic theory weren’t so gauche right now I’d make reference to an invisible hand guiding the development of the stuff.
This stuff is really awesome and is collectively responsible for my post frequency dropping off so dramatically over the past week. I’m completely consumed with it and only now, in my weary state am I incapable of working with it and forced to transition to sleep by writing a boring blog post.
Everywhere I look on the web I’m wondering if certain sites have an API and if so what could I do with it. It really keeps reminding me of Douglas Copeland’s book Microserfs and the development software the characters are creating in the second half of the book. Everything feels like lego blocks now. And when I try to explain that to the luddites, they just look back at me with a blank look on their face, not understanding WTF I’m talking about.
It reminds me of when I was back in high school and I have to give a presentation on a current event that I thought was significant and then explain why I thought it was important. This was back in 1993. For a few years at that point I’d been hearing about Apple’s move to adopt a new processor architecture. They’d been using the 68000 series Motorla processor since their start and to move to another processor would mean changing all of their architecture, including their operating system.
They changed over to a new processor called “PowerPC” which, iconically then, had been co-developed by IBM, which many of us still incorrectly perceived as Apple’s rival. It was the same processor that would be used a few years later in the first Playstation (which had two, one for graphics, one for regular operations).
I knew that the chip was heralding a major change in the computing world and, coupled with what was happening with computer networking and the first public ISPs starting to show up, we were on the dawn of a new era in information architecture. And I got up there in front of a bunch of seventeen year-olds and told them all this and they stared back at me like I was humping the chalkboard.
Of course, I turned out to be right.
And I think I’m right this time too. This stuff, and maybe location awareness coupled with an expansion of the web into the mobile realm, are going to be major players in the next five years of web development. Even if the economy continues to tank. Maybe even because of it…
QuantumTom 