Radical Transparency and Web Integration

Twitter is great, and this small 5 million $ company is growing like crazy. The core of their service is inherently simple: blogging/chatting with no longer than 150 characters. They opened up all of their API’s and Twitter is now flurishing with activity. Hell, we even integrated it in our language learning platform: [http://iknow.co.jp/](http://iknow.co.jp/) (more to come) It’s only the first step however, these services could open up even more!

iKnow is a service that specializes in online learning and therefore the SNS part of the site is nevertheless important but still secondary. Right now in our service iKnow you can upload a picture together with your journal entry. It would be nice if we could provide more picture uploading and managing functionality, but we don’t want to build that. [Flickr](http://flickr.com/) specializes in these things and would make a nice addition. Unfortunately, a service like Flickr doesn’t provide a real transparent API yet – people still need to register for a Flickr account.

Also, it would be nice if could provide status updates for all people on the website using Twitter – but people still need to go through the registration procedure at Twitter.com to be able to use it. I think the next success in web integration lies in opening up your API’s to an extend where it is completely transparent to use them. You don’t need to worry about registering at the third party service.

But what about the revenue? If people don’t come to your website anymore, you cannot get any advertising money! That maybe so since most sites still rely on people being exposed to banners/adwords on their website. These things will change however:

* there will be in-content advertising, an example is the already emerging in-video ads * the freemium model will also be applied to API’s. A free API is for personal use, a premium API is for integration use in other web services. This premium API will not require you to let people pre-register at the very least.

The big picture really makes sense: online services will be more specialized. Right now you could imagine that photo management is done by something like flickr/picasaweb, status updates by twitter, music integration by last.fm etc. But things could fragment even more when there is an open integration market: facebook-style wall service, embeddable message/mail service, tagging service, rating service or image cropping service. An example of the latter is [PicNik](http://picnik.com/) a service recently integrated into Flickr.

sidethought: will this kill branding?