Restrictive APIs

After writing a Greasemonkey script accessing Flickr’s photo API, Daniel Kim thinks the API is too restrictive for his remixing needs. He writes:

“Another point to consider is that as these mash-ups get more sophisticated they will no longer be pure mash-ups. Instead of merely exploiting existing relationships between data in different web sites, they will allow for the creation and storage of new relationships amongst data that is globally distributed across the web. These applications will need to have write access to their own databases, built on DBMS’s designed for the web.”

His whole post is Web Databases vs. Web Services/API’s. It’s a long one, full of lots of interesting points.