Just had an insight about opening API's. If you have the best process for adding new valuable data (your users add it, or you have a great web spider, or whatever), it makes great sense to open up your api's. People will become dependent on you. You remove a lot of competition. If you don't, in other words, if you already have pretty much all the data you're going to have, it does not make sense to open up your data through an api. You'd be giving away your store.
So competitive advantage lies in the ability to expand and improve your data more reliably than others.
# Mar 14, 2005