The Rise of the Closed APIs
During my time as a developer I have used many external APIs (application programming interfaces) to build our business. The social media ones in particular have enabled us to create creative and engaging websites where users can generate content through various external platforms.
The power of a fully open API is enormous, and there are a lot of companies building their whole businesses based on these open external services. There is, however, a new wave of closing off the beautiful open structures and replacing them with managed, invite-only systems, where access is cut off without regard for third-parties that integrate their former open APIs. Why are they doing this?
For instance websites like Gramfeed, that enabled users to search Instagram photos and hashtags, has been closed down. But also large players like Flipboard announced they no longer support Instagram because of recent restrictions. I myself noticed the closing of the Instagram API via our own company social feed where Instagram posts suddenly stopped showing up.
I began researching the reasons behind the changes and came across similar cases in the past. There are apparently a lot of sad stories to be found on successful startups that had to quit because of API restrictions in major networks. Recently, the social analytics company ThinkUp announced that their service has shut down. Like their co-founder Anil mentioned in his statement, it’s just impossible to keep up.
“If we make all the necessary development changes that would be required to continue supporting these networks, there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t just change their APIs again.”
— Anil Dash, Medium
The “Walled Garden” Pattern
Like Techcrunch reported back in 2011, it looks like there is a pattern emerging where major networks restrict access to protect their businesses. It’s a pattern where an open API culture changes over time towards a more closed model — a walled garden so to speak. Looking at the history of large platform APIs there a couple of key phases that they all have in common:
- Start-up phase: where everything is open and uncontrolled, third-party integration blooms.
- Restricted phase: a review system is added and closing of important public data points (e.g. requesting personal user data). Mostly because of a high API usage or abuse, more control is needed. Third-party systems make sure they obey the new rules.
- Closed phase: where only special partner programs give access to the platform API and informal one-off usage is fully discouraged, almost all public access is blocked.
Looking the major networks there is a long line of examples where the open APIs are closed down as the network grows following these phases.
It’s business, nothing personal
I personally think that the reason behind this open-closed phases model is driven by the need to create a steady income using online advertising. Of course the networks themselves forget to mention this and talk about things like ‘creating and guarding a better user experience’ or ‘quality control of content’. The basic rule is when you embed published network content on your own website and it doesn’t let users view the ads that are native to the platform, no revenue is made. At the end of the day, the large networks want you to use their own tools, plugins and company pages to market your products. They need to be stable media companies who control when and where people can access published content. Like it’s been said before, it’s business, nothing personal.
Evolving for Change
This, of course, doesn’t take into account the fact that the third-party applications promote the networks and can drive extra traffic to the service or promote the use. Creativity is also being blocked by restricting more and more APIs. Looking at our own concepts in social advertising, the shutdown of the public Instagram API removes a lot of possibilities for hashtag-driven campaigns. As a company we always needed to adapt to a new situation.
I remember years ago when a friend of mine was a 100% Facebook focused company that built Company Page Tabs (remember those!) with Facebook login. Because of the popularity there was a constant search for exploiting the Facebook API for new ways of getting your campaign to as many users as possible as quickly as possible, all for the lowest price of course.
Over time Facebook changed all the key API features, like tagging friends and uploading photos, which were in the end completely disabled for campaigns. Facebook wanted you to use their advertising systems and promoted post option. At that time you saw companies being forced to work around this broken ‘free’ advertising system based on the open API. They would use other methods to creating original interactions for their users by using dedicated campaigning websites based on other channels and techniques. In the case of Instagram (a Facebook company), the changes mean that driving hashtag-based campaigns, or creating custom scraper pages for a one-off events was no longer allowed. The FAQ of Instagram now states:
We do not approve apps that are created for one-off projects (e.g. a hashtag campaign, an event, a website)
—FAQ, Instagram
Final Advice
For developers building on top of these open platforms, the changes feel like betrayal. It causes you to fight and think of ways around the API blocks, but I honestly think that in the end you can’t make the Goliaths from changing their — let’s not forget — already free services, and you need to move on. In some way it creates more room for new networks to flourish or support the building of open source projects which never can be closed down, because they lack the media marketing-driven incentive.
So my advice would be when you commit yourself to these (in the beginning) open APIs and something gets restricted, just frown, walk it off and go think of fresh, new ideas with original interaction and communication in your work. This bad thing can even become a good thing for your own creativity.
