I’m in San Francisco for three days of Web discussions. The Web2 series is always interesting, and offers a good look at what might happen in the future. I just attended a presentation on eBay and open services. The presenter compared eBay’s decision to open its APIs to developers to that of AT&T’s decision to allow third-party devices to connect to the telephone network (the presentation will be available at http://innovation.ebay.com/)
In both cases, the openness led to tremendous advantage.

• For US phone users, billions of dollars in revenue — from answering machines to faxes to modems — were added to the economy. One could even argue that the addition of all these components paved the way for today’s Internet. Imagine if we had to get the telco-approved home router and what that would do to stifle innovation.
• For eBay the market was already building a number of tools for modifying and optimizing both the buying and selling process. At the time, this was achieved through screen-scraping: Pulling down pages and extracting the HTML from them. Not only was this inefficient and error-prone, but every time eBay changed its site, this broke the applications.

Some eye-opening mash-ups — including the combination of Craig’s List housing properties and Google Maps — prompted the folks at eBay to open and document the interfaces to their user base. The results were impressive: Over 55 percent of listings on eBay are submitted by their APIs rather than the traditional eBay web application. That’s billions of dollars in transactions over non-human-web interactions.

The idea of openness is one we spend a lot of time working on at Coradiant. We have a wide range of APIs, from legacy protocols such as SNMP (used by practically every Enterprise Management Software package) to more cutting-edge interfaces like real-time streams of user traffic that can be visualized in interesting ways through browsers or desktop applications.

Our openness has been a deciding factor in many of our customers’ decision to buy TrueSight. Of course, the main focus of our Real User Monitoring appliances is their own interfaces, which operators use to troubleshoot and optimize web apps. But a secondary use is delivering real user data to other destinations. Our ability to get to the individual user sessions and objects, and then to step back and aggregate huge amounts of traffic in ways that make them interesting to the business, is a cornerstone of what we do.

We’re big believers that if we’re open, our customers will surprise us with new things. So far, they haven’t disappointed us.

Now for Jonathan Zittrain, an Oxford Law professor, with the provocatively named Web 2.NO, which I’m choosing over the alternate “Print 2.0″ (or, as Jonathan’s labelling it, “how do I fix my printer driver?”)

Shots from the show at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/web20summit/