At a very high level, the rules are as follows:
1. Instant Gratification " Requiring only one email to start…
2. Flexible Ingredients " Offering tools for all partner types…
3. Constant Feedback " Constantly changing content/services…
4. Human Availability " Partners cannot live by URL alone…
5. Benign Competition " Sharing Best Practices & Success Stories…

If you want to learn more about what Chris has to say, you can check out the slides from the conference. We hope to post the video's soon!

If you ever get the chance to talk to Chris, he is a really smart guy. I say you pick his brain for whatever you can get!

If you haven't met Laura, you'll have a great chance to do so in New York on March 17 at The Business of APIs - not only will you meet Laura, but you can learn a ton about APIs too! Hope to see you there!

One of the questions we're often asked is "once I launch my API, how do I attract developers to build cool things with it?" Well, Reuters has decided on a tried-and-true method - a $5,000 cash bounty for the first developer to build an OpenCalais-powered plugin for WordPress...and they have said that more such bounties will follow. Is it working? Well, there have been a lot of developer keys issued during the first 24 hours, and at least one developer has blogged that he's already working on an opencalais Ruby interface. Good luck to all!

Dave Cancel posts that Compete, the company he co-founded (but left to start Lookery with Rafer), has seen its compete.com site pass alexa.com in number of visitors.

How did this happen? Well, they did a lot of things very well, but juxtaposing the inflection points on this graph with the milestones Dave showed in his slides at The Business of APIs Conference, their Mashery-powered API was a big contributing factor.

Mashery is thrilled to have played a part in this important milestone in Compete's growth, and thanks Compete for being an early customer and ardent supporter of ours - and for showing the world how one can gain immense value by offering a free, open API.

Congratulations to the entire Compete team!

[cross-posted on Praxis]

Over 200 attendees spent Monday afternoon learning about the Business of APIs, and by all accounts, it was a rousing success. The room was packed " attendees spent the afternoon learning the benefits of opening their API from companies who have successfully done so and how they, too, can open their API to quickly and easily expand their partner network.

The day began with a presentation by Thomas Howe, who spoke to the breadth of opportunity for companies who want to engage developers with their product. Other topics included how Telcos are working to open their APIs in a move towards “Telco 2.0” and how RockYou was able to create popular applications on various social networking platforms. Attendees were treated to an energetic presentation by Dave McClure who posed that recruiting a "Geek Advisory Board" is one key to building a successful developer program. Quentin Hardy, Senior Editor at Forbes, moderated three panels, including a discussion on how the Facebook platform has changed the current landscape by opening up their platform to developers. The conference concluded with a panel of investors discussing how their investment strategies have changed to favor those who have an open API as part of their business plan.

Mashery is thrilled to have sponsored this inaugural conference and we appreciate everyone who was able to attend. We also want to thank Dealmaker Media, the producer of the conference, as well as all of the speakers and the other sponsors, Sun Microsystems, Plumbline, and Programmable Web.

Missed it? Want a recap of your favorite presentation? We'll be posting many of the presentations on the site in the next few days. Also, the conference was recorded so we’ll be posting videos of some of the panels here on the Mashery site in the near future.

The first segment of the conference talks about the business case for launching an open API. We'll have case studies from companies that have launched successful API programs, including Pikeo , Compete and RockYou. We'll also hear from executives at Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL about what the "giants" are doing in APIs.

The second segment dives into the nuts and bolts of API infrastructure. Dave McClure, who launched one of the most successful developer/API programs around during his tenure at Paypal, will talk about the essential elements of a successful developer program. Then we'll present an overview of Mashery's on-demand API infrastructure.

The final segment will cover the implications of the Facebook Platform on APIs and business, and the effect that web services have had on investment and corporate strategy. This segment will be led by Quentin Hardy, Senior Editor and Silicon Valley Bureau Chief of Forbes.

Registration for this conference is already over 70% of capacity, so if you're interested in coming, sign up today. We look forward to seeing you there!

Opening an API is the first step toward getting your web service built into third party applications, including applications on the Facebook platform. By efficiently packaging and broadening the distribution of a company's services, APIs present immediate benefits and promising growth opportunities for businesses large and small, young and old.

In an inaugural one-day conference entitled The Business of APIs, Dealmaker Media and Mashery are bringing together industry experts who have successfully launched their API distribution channel to share their strategies. Find out why and how they did it, how they measured success, and how you too can rapidly launch your own API program with minimal involvement from your internal development and IT teams. Speakers include Bradley Horowitz, VP of the Advanced Development Division at Yahoo!, Jia Shen, CTO and Co-Founder of RockYou, and Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. The conference will conclude with a discussion led by Quentin Hardy, Senior Editor and Silicon Valley bureau chief of Forbes, with prominent investors and M&A executives about how the trend towards API has influenced investment, valuation, and strategy.

This exciting event will take place on Monday, October 15, 2007, at the San Francisco City Club -- a beautiful art deco facility in the heart of the Financial District -- from 1:00pm to 6:00pm.
A hosted cocktail reception will promptly follow.

Full conference information can be found at apiconference.com. Space is limited -- sign up today. Hope to see you on October 15th!

As with all of our Mashery services, we have taken a generally understood problem - reporting - and created a solution that is tailored to the specific needs of web services providers in a way that existing off-the-shelf offerings are not able to be used.

API usage reporting presents several challenges, including:

• Large volume of data - millions of records generated per day need to be summarized and presented in a format that doesn't cause information overload, and present it without huge processing delays.
• Inconsistent data formats - each API we power has a different specification. Developer keys can be in different places, with different identifiers; API methods or other provider-specific data are even more inconsistent.
• Reports must meet the needs of web services providers who see their API as a distribution channel - ultimately, we need to create business/channel reports from technical data.
• We need to be able to scale quickly as we add customers, and as our customers' web services grow in popularity.

We were also constrained by our decision to build on the Amazon EC2 architecture. The advantage of EC2 is its scalabilty - we can add capacity as needed. But each EC2 instance is limited in processing power and especially in RAM, so we can not do memory-intensive or processor-intensive activities, such as running large relational databases to process millions of records at a time.

I am really impressed with the architecture that Clay and his team developed, and I've received a lot of compliments on the clean, easy-to process UI. We'll be adding a lot more reporting options over the next few months as our customers ask for different kinds of data. Of course, anything we build, all of our customers get to use...and knowing the companies we're working with, I expect that we'll get a lot of interesting and useful requests!

Working with Trulia has been a great experience - over the past couple weeks, they have worked incredibly hard getting the Mashery-powered Trulia developer site up and looking great. Behind the scenes, we handle all developer registration and key issuance, and provide the infrastructure that allows any developer who signs up to have immediate access to the Trulia APIs, for up to 1000 calls per day (and limited to two calls per second). For developers who need higher limits, Trulia's administrators have access to the Mashery dashboard which allows them to increase limits on a key-by-key basis.

We're particularly thankful to Trulia's team for their many suggestions and feature requests for the Mashery developer community tools. The developer site has integrated blog, forum and documentation areas which developers can access with a single signon and comment across all sections. We've added a lot of new features based on Trulia's suggestions, and we appreciate all the input that Megan, Jamie, Lawrence, Daniele, Erica, Roger, Jeff and the whole Trulia team provided.