CNet News has some nice videos of Max Mancini, eBay's "Senior Director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation", speaking at the eBay developer conference in Boston.
It's always nice to see a successful company focusing on its core competency and working on improving access to that competency. And embracing developers at the same time. Lots of companies are trying to do this, the Facebook Platform comes to mind most recently. But let's not forget the Flickr Services API, Amazon AWS, Google Code, among many others.
It's pretty compelling to think that a business can focus on core architecture and let a distributed, unaffiliated developer community drive functionality, not to mention added value. And that's value for the core business, those distributed developers, and of course users too.
Now I just need to develop that killer mashup that combines eBay and Facebook. And I'll lay it on a map using Google Maplets. As long as it's on a map, I can throw in some data from the Trulia API, a la the slick, and much touted Trulia Hindsight. And run it all from Amazon AWS. Maybe I can plug into Everyscape too. Hmm... this all might be a little bit heavy weight. Perhaps I should start with a Pipes or Popfly lite edition first. And don't worry Google, once you open the Google Mashup Editor I'll be all over it :)
Have an opinion on open platforms, APIs, and distributed development? Want to share your killer idea? Post a comment, and let us and our readers know.
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