The Best Of Both Worlds

So Facebook has an open API that allows you to add-in your application and tap into the millions of users on the platform. What's so innovative about that? Microsoft opened up their Office applications in the mid-nineties to allow add-in components to be seamlessly integrated into the GUI to complement and extend their platform in niche areas. This was good for the vertical market developers who didn't have to try to duplicate this base functionality and good for Microsoft who could get even better entrenched into these markets.

Similar business models have come to the deep and murky world of relational databases with the ability to create new object types in Oracle via 'data cartridges' that appeared on the scene in the early noughties. So my crystal ball didn't have much difficulty in predicting this development as the Web matures - but as they say hindsight is 20:20 vision. The good thing about this iteration is unlike those that went before the loosely coupled nature of the Web means that these component-based solutions are unlikely to interact in negative ways, but equally you may be able to see the joins, but the Web has taught us its benefits outway these disadvantages.

I look forward to seeing more innovative mashups and better support for component-based Web development rather than everyone reinventing the wheel and having to develop the basic backbones of a Web application. However, the hoards of web development companies that are out there may not quite see it that way! The benefit is that horizontal platforms providing generic capabilities can be extended to do more vertical market things, so the consumer gets the best of both worlds.