RantOn: External Services and API

/rant on

While taking a break from the work effort I thought it may be cool to write a tiny module that was pluggable for my blog and possibly other services. I’m a huge fan of iLike. I love music and listen to it all the time. However, there are never enough hours in the day to find new artists and new music. Pandora is a great tool for this too but it’s not socially generated. This is where iLike has hit the nail on the head. Where they fail however is opening their API.

I am of the opinion that if you are gathering information for social networking purposes that you should allow developers to extend that functionality. I felt like creating a fast little php template that pulled information in from their site that I had full control over. Generally not too much to ask. LibraryThing, del.icio.us, and others do it so I assumed that iLike would do the same. However, it appears that they are more geared towards having their own marketing than letting anyone create what they want. They have a flash widget that they allow you to put on your site, but what about those people that want to customize the look and functionality? This widget is very limiting.

The problem I have with this and any other service that leaves out the open API is that they are really restricting the developer community from making awesome applications utilizing their services. I tend to like to customize the look & feel and functionality of tools and sites that I create. Why cant it be the same with services like that. It’s really not complicated to make rpc/soap available to the community, so why not do it?

My plea to all of you creating new applications. Make time and some effort for services. Provide some external API that developers can plug into and use. It will not only help them, but it will help you too. Be kind to the community. Give back, give us an API.
/rant off