The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006
One of my favorite Internet stats to check out are the mashup and open API trendlines on the front page of Programmable Web. Consistently, month after month this year and right up until present day, we've seen the mashup stats climb intriguing steadiness.
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after John Battelle posed what happens when you mashup RSS, IM, and publishing services and end-of-2005 roundups like the best Web 2.0 software of 2005 crowned an early generation of composable apps, Enterprise Web 2.0 closes out 2006 by checking the scoreboard: the mashup and open-API trendlines on Programmable Web's front page climbed month after month all year.
The significance is that this was steady, intrigue-level growth rather than a spike — Programmable Web had become the de facto index for whether opening an API actually produced third-party composition, and by December 2006 both curves were still rising.
First-order effects
- Developers gained a steadily widening set of open APIs to compose against, and Programmable Web solidified its position as the reference tracker the ecosystem checked to gauge that supply.
Second-order effects
- Web 2.0 startups faced growing pressure to expose their own APIs, since remaining closed meant opting out of the mashup distribution channel that competitors were feeding.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern held, application value would keep migrating from standalone destinations toward platforms whose worth is measured by what others build on top of them — with open-API counts as the industry's leading indicator.
The trend: Web applications were shifting from closed destinations to recombinable service layers, with Programmable Web's API and mashup counts serving as the trend's public barometer.