Mashery

The fist panel of the conference was moderated by Quentin Hardy, Senior Editor and Silicon Valley Bureau Chief of Forbes. He was joined by Mike Hart of Netflix, Allen Hurff of MySpace, and Michele Azar of Best Buy.

The SocialWeb – Leveraging APIs to Build Community

This was a wide-ranging conversation that moved from goals and metrics to communicating with developers, empowering users, and making the internal business case for API publishing. Here are a few of the most revealing statements from the panel:

• Michele Azar (Best Buy) – Describing how publishing the API has affected more than just users and external developers: “It has opened up a whole sea of internal business development, as well as external, customer-facing applications.”
• Allen Hurff (MySpace) – On giving customers access to their profile information outside the MySpace site: “If you create the compelling product, they’ll come back to you.”
• Mike Hart (Netflix) – An insight gained through watching developers make use of the published API: “Lots of little apps can add a lot of value.”

One theme that all of the panelists strongly echoed was this: If you pay close attention to the needs of your developers and respond quickly, they will take notice and become great allies.

Further interesting quotes:

• Allen Hurff (MySpace) – On the cost/benefit ratio of spreading their API: “We’ve gotten 4,000 new applications out of it so far and we didn’t code one of them.”
• Mike Hart (Netflix) – Explaining that there can be ancillary benefits from API publishing: “It may also cut costs in other places as well. It’s hard to say out of the gate where the value will come from.”
• Michele Azar (Best Buy) – Explaining how valuable it is to publish with allies: “Reach out to partners. Mashery was really our saving grace. We were able to partner really quickly.”