APIs and Structuring Data
Readers of this blog know that I think we will see more companies who have a similar architecture to twitter—users will derive the value of a service through 3rd parties. I’m willing to bet that companies with this model are dealing with unstructured data. I don’t mean unstructured from a code standpoint, but rather the output of the users. If you look at twitter, you have movies, music, tech, and other interests mixed within the data stream. Facebook and other social nets have categories for this information to be entered. Applications also add additional structure.
Structure is a key element in the monetization of APIs. Domain specific categorization is one of the easiest ways for a service to tag data. The MyTrade bot is a great example. It can help Twitter identify a string of letters as a ticker. That’s huge.
