ReadWriteWeb

This week 3scale is increasing the breath of its services by adding three collections of APIs that it can handle with its API management platform. Until 3scale, companies needed to put their API infrastructure as a proxy layer in front of their CDNs, slowing if not completely disrupting the API provider quality of service, architecture and business model. The three collections include user management APIs for portals and integration with CRM services, billing APIs, and analytics for push and pull data analysis. These add to their existing traffic management APIs that have been used by Skype for nearly two years and other customers include Softonic and FullContact.

Mashery recently open-sourced a new interactive API documentation system called Mashery I/O Docs. It's available from Github.

I/O Docs enables developers to experiment with API calls from within the documentation. You can see it in action at Posterous and Wordnik Alibris and Klout (correction: the Posterous and Wordnik APIs were the inspiration for I/O Docs, but don't use I/O Docs).

Rovio, the company behind the wildly popular app Angry Birds, has plans to launch a live, multi-player and multi-media version of its mobile game. That new, richer version of the game could be offered at no cost to the data plans of users, through carrier partnerships. If successful, this plan for what to do with the huge Angry Birds market footprint (now with more than 100 million downloads), could cause substantial technical and economic disruptions across the mobile world. Rovio hopes it will, as do a number of other industry players.

We put clues together at South by Southwest this week, based on conversations with several Rovio team members and other industry leaders, and sketched out what I believe is the company's plan. Rovio team members have now confirmed that the following theory is accurate.

Here is the first of a two-part series about the rise of APIs at SXSW this year. It consists of five interviews: Oren Michels of Mashery, Mike Maney of Alcatel-Lucent, John Musser of Programmable Web, Sam Ramji of Apigee and Matt Galligan, chief strategy officer at SimpleGeo.

I fashioned a new video tool with an old fishing rod for the interviews. It helps extend the camera and keeps it steady. I used my bike pant ties to attach the camera to the pole. It gets attention as you will see in the interview with Oren.

Instead of a single API, this week we're highlighting Mashery's new API discovery hub. The hub indexes APIs ranging from the The Guardian Open Platform to the Cheezburger Developer Network.

And if you build something cool with one of those APIs, be sure to submit it to the new applications directory showcasing apps built by developers using Mashery-powered APIs.

Apigee is extending its console to be integrated into a provider's Web framework.

SoundCloud, PayPal and LinkedIn have been the first to integrate the Apigee service that lets developers explore an API from within the providers development environment and share it as a social object.

Apigee-to-Go is an iFrame of the Apigee console that embeds into the provider's CSS, allowing the site to be skinned and in the process make the experience transparent to the user.

Mashery, a provider of API services, recently conducted a survey of attendees of its Business of APIs conferences in London, New York and San Francisco.The survey found that 64% of respondents cite "fostering third-party innovation" through APIs as a high priority for 2011. This was the most popular goal for API providers. The second most popular goal was "getting on as many devices as possible," which 41% of respondents cited as a high priority.

Mashery also announced new analytics capabilities this month, which will help API providers measure the business value of APIs as developers use those APIs to spread web services to multiple devices. Disclosure: Mashery is a sponsor of the main ReadWriteWeb site.

Twitter was one of the first to see what happened when traffic to the site came more from the API than the Web.

It now has more than 65 million tweets per day, most coming from services that use the Twitter API.

Twitter has made numerous changes to fix its API. Those experiences have taught providers what mistakes not to make when launching a service.

In the read/write era, enterprise technology has been playing catchup with the consumer sector, integrating social networking, wikis and activities streams into business-grade applications. But that hasn't always been the case - look at the evolution of e-mail, which was originally nurtured by enterprises. And there's at least one area in which enterprises are leading the pack today: point-and-click app creation and the data mashups that feed them.

After successfully selling MyBlogLog to Yahoo, it was surprising to see Lookery founder Scott Rafer write a blog post announcing his company's "orderly shutdown". In heartbreaking detail he took full responsibility for the company's demise saying, "In chronological order, the sins Lookery committed under my leadership were continuing our dependency on a large partner, not knowing when to cut bait on a failing asset, and building ahead of the market." While Rafer is still advising half a dozen startups and API management company Mashery continues to thrive, the loss of Lookery has taught the entrepreneur some hard lessons.