John Sheehan is a co-founder of Runscope, an API tools company in San Francisco looking for engineers and designers to help build the future of developer tools for API-driven applications. Previously, John was at IFTTT and Twilio. Last week Netflix announced that it was no longer going to issue developer keys for its public API, effectively ending their open API program. This type of change isn’t unheard of. Consumer internet services (including the social networks) are increasingly moving to a private/partner API model where a more formal partnership must exist in order to use the API. Some more recent social networks like Path, Vine and Google+ don’t even have usable open and public APIs. For these services, the traditional open API model is for all intents and purposes, dead. Use of APIs on the whole is growing like crazy. Infrastructure providers like Twilio, SendGrid and Stripe have shaken up entrenched, crowded markets by providing better APIs. Building SaaS without an API? Good luck landing that big deal with someone who wants to do a custom integration into their legacy back-end system. Companies like IFTTT are exposing APIs to the masses without them even knowing it. Even some consumer internet companies are getting great results from their API programs. 90% of Expedia’s business comes through their API. For eBay, 60% of listings come through its web services (and that was back in 2008, I imagine it’s much higher now). Open APIs that drive d
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