Integrating Web Services

Scoble responds to the question “how is the web screwed up” by talking about how there are a number of individual services that he wishes would work together.

This is a great response and a fair complaint. Most Internet sites (even the most social of them) work in isolation creating little enclosed worlds of their own. It’s something that isn’t so apparent in the traditional publishing and web 1.0 world - you don’t really expect the New York Times to be intimately interconnected with the Washington Post - but becomes readily apparent in the web 2.0 world where sites become far more personalized and more about you.

How many of the sites you use on a regular basis are really about you? Well your blog or Facebook page is about you. Then there’s your Flickr account. Your Google Reader page is about you to a certain degree - by choosing what feeds you subscribe to you customize the content on that page. I frequent a number of different forums on varying topics and the topics I participate in and the sub-communities I’m involved in on those sites are about me. It’s natural when you see a site as being about you that you’d be able to join all these pieces of yourself together into one unified whole.

But one of the problems that we see on the web 2.0 world is that these sites remain individual islands and they do so for several reasons.

Probably the most predominant reason is that they feel that keeping their systems closed is vital to their economic success. It’s hard to get loyal customers (even on the web) and it seems pure insanity to then offer up those customers for free to other sites when you get no economic benefit from doing so. Offering strong, deep connections to other services may also limit the things you can do in the future - if Facebook is tightly integrated with Flickr why should Facebook have it’s own image gallery. And there is at least the perception that a closed system will encourage additional users through the network effect - sellers use eBay because that’s where the buyers are, buyers use eBay because that’s where the sellers are. If a site like Facebook is completely open then your friends can stay on MySpace but since Facebook is closed those same friends might be encouraged to sign up to Facebook as well so they can interact with you.

In addition to all the economic incentives to remain isolated web developers face the very simple proposition that there are a lot of services out there that are potential integration partners. Some of those services have APIs, some don’t. Even the ones that do have APIs typically use proprietary APIs. Lets say that Twitter decides to develop a tight integration with Flickr - well what about all the Twitter users that prefer Smugmug? Then there are those on Picasa web. And it goes on and on. I appreciate the desire to have all the services you use tightly integrated but the reality is that a provider could easily spend all of their time working on integrating with others leaving no time to further develop their own service.

I suppose it’s possible to create a sort of universal API for integrating web 2.0 properties in some sort of lightweight way that may provide at least some of the integration that users seek. I’ll have to think about that some more (though I can’t imagine that it’s something I could ever launch perhaps Google will come up with something).

In the meantime there’s a need and an opportunity for providing services that work across different web 2.0 properties or services which integrate a user’s web 2.0 usage. There are a number of ideas here I’d like to explore further in the future.