Christian Heilmann gives advice on how to succeed on the open web. He recommends focusing on building for the web using existing web technologies and APIs rather than proprietary systems. Specifically, he suggests starting with Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) to build and test APIs by accessing and combining data from various web services and sites. By making APIs and data openly available, it can help developers and others build on your work, which in turn helps gain recognition and an audience on the web. Overall, the key is leveraging existing web technologies and standards through open collaboration rather than trying to do everything alone or reinventing the wheel.
32. Reasons for APIs:
You can change the backend or the
frontend when you need to.
You build them in parallel.
You can have various different interfaces
to the same content (mobile, web, iPad...)
You give third parties access to your data
and not to your system.
You crowdsource innovation.
46. select * from csv where
url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=tpWDkIZMZleQaREf493v1Jw&output=
csv"
and
columns="Year,City,Sport,Discipline,Countr
y,Event, Gender,Type"
and Year="1924"
50. All you need is a
developer who
knows how to
access data on the
web.
51. YQL helps you filter
and convert
information - even
for mobile
environments.
52. Using YQL has a lot of
benefits:
No time wasted reading API docs
Using the console makes creating
complex queries dead easy.
Data filtering down to the least
amount necessary.
Fast pipes.
Caching + converting
Server-side JavaScript for complex
conversions