Crispy Shop: Public APIs for Commerce
Check out Crispy Shop. Very nice AJAX/Flash interface for filtering and purchasing electronic goods. The bookmarking of favorite items is very nice.
This is a good example the next area for mashup development - commercial use. Commercial use is great because it means:
1. More stable APIs - no one is going to base their business on a moving or unreliable API.
2. (Hopefully) The loosening up of API licenses - currently many (flickr??) are only for non-commercial work. (OK, flickr does have the option for commercial licenses - but, they are notoriously difficult to get)
3. More UI innovation. If you want people to use your interface, you’re really going to have to differentiate yourself from the API’s creator (flickr, amazon, yahoo shopping, etc). If you don’t, why would anyone use your site? At the same time, because you’re using a public API, the time it takes to build an application is greatly reduced - so you can afford to take more chances.
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