un-Eventful API
2010-05-13 19:43:00Imagine this…
…You are a website that enables users to find, share and promote events throughout the world. A useful service indeed but you obviously depend on a large user base to drive and monetise your site - lots of people uploading new events, and lots of people clicking on your affiliate ticket links so you can earn some well deserved cash. So you make your website free and easy to use - so far so un-Eventful.
Let’s go a step further and add an API that is ‘is built upon a unique, open platform that enables partners and web applications to leverage [our] data, features and functionality’. Now developers can integrate our wealth of information in to their own sites so long as they aren’t reselling the information, don’t make excessive use of the API and ensure the events link back to your website, while all the time increasing the traffic to your website and affiliate links - everyone’s a winner!
Now a lot your information is location specific - you usually only want to know about events going on in your area - so with the growth of location-aware mobile applications let’s create an iPhone app so people can find out about events on the go. But hey, other app developers might come up with new and innovative ways of using this data just like they have done when creating websites using our API, or they may want to create an app on another platform that we haven’t developed for yet so let’s extend the API for use in mobile apps. Imagine all that new traffic to our site, growing the community and with any luck increasing sales of tickets through our site. Surely we want as many developers as possible to make use of this so let’s make the barrier to entry as low as possible - let’s charge $3000 a year per application! Even for free applications!…
This is the approach Eventful.com takes when licensing their API for mobile use on any platform, as I found out when developing an application for Android mobile phones. As an independent developer working in my spare time I had assumed that the same free use of their API for web applications would extend to (free) mobile applications. Sadly not. In order to build an application that users can download and use for free to find out about events happening in their area and that links these events through to the Eventful.com website a license fee of $3000/year must be paid. Yep that’s right - developers must pay for the privilege of driving traffic to the Eventful.com website, even for applications available for free. Bargain.
Amazon.com go event further and forbid the use of their APIs in any mobile applications. You want to make your application more useful by linking through to items on the Amazon website so that users can possibly make a purchase? Oh no you don’t, that’s against the rules.
Incidentally it is still free to use these APIs in mobile web applications, just not in native platform applications. Why the distinction? I’m still trying to work that one out, but in an era when most sites have realised the advantages of being open with their data, it seems odd that some companies are reversing this trend and putting up such high barriers to use the very same data in the rapidly growing area of mobile applications.