Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the New York Times's API launch event. Tim O'Reilly spoke about the evolution of newspapers, and said hailed Times Open (their API) as a significant step in the right direction for an important industry facing big challenges.
When Times CTO Marc Frons announced their API plans in May of last year, we at Mashery began fielding a lot of calls from news organizations looking to learn about APIs and figure out how they could build new revenue and distribution from opening their content and, as Marc said, making the NYT programmable.
One of the more intriguing inquiries we received was from the Guardian in the UK. Not only are they making their content available through their API, but they are also publishing content from other sources in what they call the "Data Store...a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications."
The Data Store is of particular interest because the team at the Guardian recognized that just as they provide a mix of their own and others' content on their website in order to make a more complete and compelling experience for their readers, so should they include as much of their third party data and content as possible in their API. This gives developers a broader range of content to incorporate in their applications, as my very good friends (and Mashery customers) at Zemanta have already demonstrated. But more importantly, it allows smaller content providers who already leverage the Guardian's brand and traffic to reach a broader online audience to enjoy the same benefits from the Guardian's API. And the Guardian is able to build a stronger distribution channel for their own content by broadening the data available to their developer community. Everyone wins.
Today, we're happy to report that the Guardian has launched its API, including the Data Store, using Mashery's services. We're providing all the usual pieces of the API puzzle - rate limiting and business rules enforcement, key issuance, developer management, caching, and so on - but with a twist, since we will need to enable the Data Store to set different rules for different data sets. One of the most critical elements will no doubt be our reporting, which will be used to track who is using which data.
I expect to see many other news providers - and travel sites, e-etailers, search engines, and everyone else - adopt the Data Store model in coming months. Should be very interesting.
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