In the last couple of months, there’s been a rush for APIs. The whole social networking phenomenon has made sharing user details and activities between networks a critical feature every network needs to support, at least incoming if not outgoing. You want to attract users to your network, with all their friends. More friends, more users, more eyes equal bigger advertising profits. Incoming API support is a necessity, but can also pose data bombs or a rapid growth of the user database.

Now, why would you support outgoing APIs, since you would lose members to other networks? Well, not exactly. If you provide widgets, you can market your site from outside back to your site. How do you get these external widgets? By inviting developers to write them. They don’t cost you anything to have developers build them. More developers equal more widgets, more attraction and better ROI. Err, not really investment per say. A better return on the technology at hand.

But then each network has it’s own API, own protocol, and own data structure. Developers hate having to read each API to figure out how to interact and get data to and from each network. Open Social is a great start, but it is taking time to build a standard. Networks are not waiting for the standards, as there’s a rush to get something out in the crowd. Hopefully we don’t end up in a similar situation as the browsers are in.