Amazon, Lendle and the Danger of Using Open APIs
Lendle, an ebook-sharing service that allows users to find and trade Kindle books, sounds like a great idea — except that it doesn’t work anymore, because Amazon pulled the plug on the site by blocking access to the Amazon API. According to Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft, there was no warning from the online retailer, only a cryptically worded email. So Lendle becomes the latest poster child for a simple maxim: Building your service on top of someone else’s API, no matter how “open” the API is supposed to be, is a very dangerous road.
No one knows the downside of this approach better than Bill Gross, the founder of UberMedia, which the veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur has built into a kind of Twitter client rollup by acquiring services and apps such as UberTwitter and Echofon. Gross originally had a great idea for selling advertising around tweets as well, but then Twitter launched its own identical advertising platform. Earlier this year, after what Twitter said was bad behavior by some of UberMedia’s apps, the social-media platform shut down the company’s access to the Twitter API.
In UberMedia’s case, the company made some changes to its apps, and Twitter turned the API tap back on. It’s not clear whether Lendle will be able to modify the way its service works to make Amazon happy, however. The online retailer hasn’t made any statement about the action it has taken against the ebook-lending service other than to say Lendle doesn’t “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.” We’ve emailed Amazon and will update this [...]
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We'll see if Amazon comes up with a reasonable (or any) explanation, but if they don't this is the kind of thing that really turns me off to a company. Lendle appears to be making books more accessible, Amazon appears to be more interested in making money than in supporting that access. There may be underlying factors, of course, but if it's as simple as eliminating 'competition' I think they'll find they're cutting off their corporate nose to spite their face. Unfortunate. Amazon was a pioneering endeavor that's really helped pave the way in making the Internet the amazing tool it is, and I've always felt like they went about things in a respectable manner but this would be unsavory. So we'll see (if any more is ever said about it) how it shakes out, but I hope it's not as simple as 'capital wins; free access to information loses'.
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