Yesterday, we reported on Alcatel-Lucent’s surprising acquistion of ProgrammableWeb.com, a blog content site and API repository for Web and mashup developers. You can read about Alcatel-Lucent’s reasoning behind the deal there (in brief, it supports ALU’s own API service and application integration strategy).
Today, we got the chance to talk with ProgrammableWeb founder John Musser, who shared his thoughts on the state (or lack thereof) of telco APIs. We’ve been covering service provider API efforts for years now, from upstarts like Ribbit and ifbyphone to incumbents such as BT and Orange. We’ve yet to see a truly impressive, blow-it-out-of-the-water telco API story (even as rivals such as Apple spawn thousands of apps and spin out entire new markets). Musser shared his thoughts on what has worked, what hasn’t and what opportunity still exists for telcos in the API game.
Why combine with Alcatel-Lucent?
We stayed away from crass considerations like money
But what about the APIs?
While on our call, Musser did a quick check of the “telephony and messaging” category of the ProgrammableWeb API repository and found just 82 listings (of more than 2000 and growing total listings). Not great. Telecom API efforts, he noted, have always had an element of “sticking a toe in the water” about them — an approach that simply won’t appeal to pragmatic, bottom-line-minded developers. When developers use an API, they are making a bet on that code and the company behind it. Developers aren’t going to make a big bet unless the API provider goes all in, as well. Beyond that, “the other challenge for incumbent [service providers] has been getting the word out. How do you get in touch with developers?” Musser said, calling such outreach, or evangelism in developer-speak, “fundamentally important.”
Is it game over yet?
Certainly Alcatel-Lucent believes there’s plenty of room for telco APIs to flourish. But it’s been disconcerting, Musser agreed, to see outsiders begin to own key API areas that telecom service providers by all right should have dominated, like location. But while mobile operators know more about where a user is than just about anyone, it was creative entrepreneurs and developers at Web- and software-focused start-ups like Foursquare that made the biggest splash in location-based services, not telcos. “Foursquare is the classic [story] of creative developers finding a way to make things happen, making use of tools at hand,” Musser said. “Check-in [the location idea at the heart of Foursquare] is just ‘good enough,’” a philosophy that has driven many of the Web’s greatest developer stories, from Netscape to Google. That said, the billions of dollars of service revenue generated by mobile operators for services like SMS are surely appealing for Web and app developers, who would like to be able to tap into that revenue stream to help monetize their services, Musser said. “There’s an opportunity for us here with Alcatel to make that process simpler and more coherent for both sides of the equation,” he said, “for the service provider and the developer.”
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below:
82 APIs in the telephony & messaging category seems like a huge success. As a PW user, quality and originality are what I’m after. I’ll take 82 mostly-unique services over 500 nearly-identical URL shorteners or Twitter photo upload sites.
Exposing first-of-their-kind API calls takes actual engineering, especially in telecom. It’s not just checking out an open source git repo and throwing that app up on a domain name.
I think PW’s value is also independent of API count. When I visit, I want to find a service that does what I want (or stumble across something I hadn’t even thought of), not 50 identical services. 5 is great, 50 is a filtering problem.
I’d consider Alcatel an odd fit except for the talk Ross Turk (of ALU) did at GlueCon this month. His passion fit in with our API crowd. Looking forward to seeing what comes from it.