I’ve long maintained if an API cannot be used for commercial purposes it’s little more than a toy. Even when it can be used for commercial purposes, it’s important to realize that the parent service can always add any feature you’ve created to their own service. They are in the pole position to usurp your efforts with an upgrade and “new” feature effectively killing or severely maiming your project.

You might be able to mashup something cool, but at a lower level you’re also creating programs for the site/service to replicate down the road if they reach a certain interest level. It doesn’t mean that it’s not fun playing with toys and ego stroking hitting a homerun with a widget, plugin or mashup, but perspective must always be maintained. Serious businesses including small developer shops like mine have to be extremely careful where our time is spent and what third party tools and APIs are utilyzed for projects. We can’t afford to spend too much time developing features for other companies that don’t generate some kind of income directly. No commercial rules for APIs make creating new features for cool services much less desirable.

Like other developers I’m excited to see APIs, but after reading the fine print I’m more often than not disappointed. You know the cliche, the big print giveth, the small print taketh …

Yesterday Google ate some of their young by releasing MyMaps:

we’re announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos — all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results.

At the same time they took a swing at their own maps API saying it wasn’t “easy.” In other words, they’re going directly to users and skipping developers. This is the area where Ning with limited success it seems has tried to play ball. I played around with MyMaps this morning and it looks like a complimentary service to the other sharing products they have: Google Spreadsheets and Docs.

It took me all of a few seconds to create a good places to eat in Pierce county map and leave it (default checked) to share with the rest of the world. Just one location on there now, a really good deli (map) at 6th and Trafton in Tacoma. Best subs I’ve ever had at great prices.

I digress.

Tony from Deep Jive Interests responds:

Brilliant, almost in its ruthless execution. Release a public API that encourages mashups. Allow a thousands ideas to bloom. Cherry pick the ones which the “market” has elected in terms of traffic, buzz, and popularity. Then, copy that idea.

This happens outside of mashups and APIs too, so the risk of working on something that another company with a stronger position can “create” is part of the development process. Flock will likely feel great pain from Mozilla’s announcement that they are going to be baking in some attractive social features directly in the Firefox browser via The Coop. Long time readers will note that I was impressed by Flock and believed these social features belonged in the browser. Not many others jumped aboard the Flock train (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch liked Flock too), but now that Mozilla seems to agree that the fit is right, watch opinions change.

Though unrelated, this situation reminds me a bit of what Google did when they quietly backroomed their SOAP API. Google never said the SOAP API was permanent and if you read the fine print of a lot of the APIs out there, there is all sorts of hemming and hawing happening.

This isn’t to say developers shouldn’t use APIs. Of course not. Rather, it’s important not to put too many eggs in the API basket. Build the primary features yourself whenever you can. I feel for the map mashup developers, I’m not trying to make this post be an I told you so. Microsoft has been making moves like Google did — eating their own — for years.

This is one of the main reasons I’ve been and continue to be very cyncial about the whole web pooh point oh scene. It’s not that I don’t think a small few good ideas are coming out of the web 2.0 scene, but ideas where the foundation relies upon another company’s API, especially if it’s a non-commercial API, is a very risky business plan.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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