

Where is the programmable web - un

Hello, what do you think of the following:<p>There's seems a lack of web api's being created on a pay for use basis. Most web companies I see are creating end user applications. The api's available are mostly for newfeeds or databases (ebay/amazon/google apps).<p>Why aren't there more developers quickly turning out micropayment api's. There's a whole lot of people on the net - affiliates - who are scrambling to make some money off of lousy ebooks or adsense etc., give them real products they can earn commissions on.<p>Sort of break things competely into one man companies earning small commissions on multiple products in a free flowing market.<p>An area where this type of thing is really lacking is in image recognition. Someone could put a service where for one tenth of cent it will locate a cat in a picture, someone else puts out a dog recognizer (see opencv or torchvision haar recognizer). Or in speech recognization, someone works to create a really good "hello" recognizer, someone else puts out a "bye" recognizer etc.
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sh1mmer
I think there are a couple of reasons. Which is not to say it won't happen
(tipjoy rocks), it's just hard.

Payment is about trust. In order use someone to give or collect money on my
behalf I have to trust them. Trust for startups is hard.

Secondly, people aren't always interested in small payments. When the cost of
a transaction approaches zero it often becomes it.

If there were an arbitrary scale of value, people would more willing to pay $5
for some that gives them 5 value than $0.50 for something that gives them 1
value. They would look for something that gave them 1 value for free.

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un
If the applications being created are very small, e.g. in a few hours or days,
as is the case in the content creation industry (for websites), small sums of
money work. Websites are running on adsense, 1 dollar for every thousand page
views (uses of the site).

As for trust, a third party can run the application and meter use (as in
amazon ec2 and payment system), and besides, if a user doesn't pay or a
provider doesn't give quality product, you will withdraw your offer from that
person pretty quickly. As examples, affiliate systems like commission
junction, clickbank, adsense are working.

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paraschopra
Are you talking about <http://www.strikeiron.com/>?

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un
Yes, what I'm saying is there are far too few of these, there's over a million
developers out there. Even many of these strikeiron services are just news,
you send a small query and get a simple result, rather than sending a
complicated spreadsheet of data and having it transformed and returned.

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un
where i said micropayment api's i meant api's which can be used for a small
payment (few cents or lower)

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bootload
_"... i meant api's which can be used for a small payment (few cents or lower)
..."_

do S3 & AppEngine count?

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un
Yes S3 and appengine are doing this, but still at the nondomain "computer
programmer" type level. A better example would salesforce app exchange, domain
specific applications being created on top of others. But this level of
activity is still small. There are a much larger number of excel spreadsheet
templates/macros etc.

What I was thinking of as that a single developer/domain expert (e.g
accountant) could quickly create a small program in an hour or a day or so and
immediately have it hosted somewhere for someone to pay for it and use it.
This program might be using someone else's small program that does something
specific. An "end of the line" entrepreneur/marketer would be creating/paying
for the final website interface that the end user uses and pays for (or it
could be advertising supported). As it is used, all the various creators would
be compensated appropriately. The market ecosystem of suppliers would sort out
the complexity (as is done in the manfucturing/distribution/retail industry).

The above would start working when there is critical mass of
developers/designers that are willing to create and consume each others
products.

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davidmathers
Mechanical Turk?

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un
Mechanical turk is human powered.

