I don’t pretend to understand how it works but I do like the look of Mashery. If APIs are going to transform business, if they’re going to become a feature of everyday organisational interaction, if we’re going to start saying ‘API’ as a kind of shorthand for the swapping of functions and data in our increasingly networked environment, then we’re going to need tools like Mashery.
Of course, I think Mashery is necessarily a transitional business: the longer-term for enablers like Mashery is probably less interesting: their plumbing function will presumably be absorbed by the API providers themselves. Standards will develop, the stack will evolve and APIs will take on management features of their own – a UI will emerge. Adding an API to an application will become a matter of setting some switches in the compiler or choosing an option in your app generator.
APIs will soon generate their own stats and account for their own usage – interrogating your API for details of your partners’ activity will be a trivial daily activity. In the meantime, though, Mashery takes care of all that. Neat.
API defined at Wikipedia.