Like anything else once a good idea gets out into the public people will fall over themselves trying to mimic what’s already been done. Remember back in the 80’s when video shops were poping up on every street corner. And remember how the shelves were jammed with bad (cheesey) apocalypse movies. Well that’s what this new internet boom is looking like. You’ve got your A list of reddit,Technorati, FeedBurner, Flickr and del.ico.us to name a few and then you’ve got the B list with Blogmarks, Pixel Groovy, itsdEx and Pooln just to name a few more Web2.0-ers. I’m not saying that the B list is sub-par, it’s just that they seemed to come on the scene after the start and maybe just before the peak.

Once you get through the hype and the ajax and the social cuteness of is one thing I look for with any new Web2.0 technology or site or whatnot:

Is their a developers page?
Do they have an API I can hack on?

If company is going to jump onto the Software-as-a-Service boat then they better have someting I can fiddle with.

Forinstance FeedBurner has some documentation on using their syndication services. If the number “Flared” items (18 out of 101 at last count) is any indication of how useful the API is or how easy it is to use then I’d have to guess that it not. Good effort though.

Now take Blogmarks. They offer an RSS Feeds and and it you do a google search you’ll find a few tutorials. The tutorials are from May and Sept 2005 (ancient my intenet standards) and are pretty light in content. Again good effort but….

These are just 2 examples that I have found and I am sure there are some top notch sites out there with API’s to frickn’ die for.

I’d like to now move focus to one of the vhechiles that allow us the ability to communicate on the web and that is Blogging software.

The that I like the most is Wordpress. I like it because first and formost it’s FREE, second it’s Open Source and third Wordpress has a killer API to hack with. (I wonder where thay make their money?) In the right hands I have seen some killer apps (plugins) built for and with Wordpress. From Amazon affiliate intergration to RSS Feed customization Wordpress is a one stop shop. But it’s not just the WP API that makes WP great it’s all the other “things” out there that can interact with WP.

For instance FeedBurner’s API is is like a 6.5 on a scale of 1 to 10 but Jeremy T. Finke wrote a WP Plugin (Feedburner Widget) (that intergrates into the Sidebar Widgets by Automattic) which lets a site owner add syndicated chicklets to a sidebar on the site that are redirected back through Feedburner.

So using FeedBurners’ API some hacker wrote some code that intergrates with Wordpress that lets you use your FeedBurner feed account to publish the RSS Feed from your site. Now FeedBurnner is like an 8.5.

Web2.0 reminds me of trying to explain WebServices 6 years ago. WebServices are not about what you can see thay are about what you can do. And this goes for the new band-wagon hoppers. If they really want to be successfuly they need to be open enough to allow others to intergrate their “thing” into other “things”. Like intergrating FeedBurner into Wordpress.