New York Times Embraces Content Distribution
Now the New York Times is opening its content to developers with an API to be delivered soon. Although no one knows exactly what Times content will be accessible, the API opens up developers to creating new applications using Times' content, say - restaurant reviews, sports, real estate classifieds. From Read Write Web:
The real opportunity here extends beyond the New York Times. Mainstream media ("MSM") will eventually understand that opening up their content will increase their traffic and reinforce their brand names. Once many media (even TV networks can develop APIs) decide to open their content to redistribution, it will create entrepreneurial growth of new content syndication platforms (or better analogy, channels) that can cover a variety of topics nationally or locally. Note Twitter alone is responsible for 140+ applications... user-generated content distribution is inevitable.An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper.
"The web of the near-term future isn't about pages any more," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick in his massive post on APIs in March. "It's about data, flying around, hopefully under the control of users, and offering a world of possibilities that few of us could have imagined just a few years ago."
The New York Times seems to understand that. Says Aron Pilhofer, the paper's interactive news editor, the goal of an API is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."
How does this impact real estate marketing? When old media controlled content, a real estate professional could NOT publish content (like publishing a newspaper article), they could only buy advertising for marketing purposes. In the new world of MSM content distribution, it behooves the RE professional to create the content that will be reformatted, redistributed and syndicated through mainstream media. That's how online marketing will work. The biggest reason why an RE professional should develop blogs, participate in social media and Twitter is to prepare to market themselves online, even before the consumer shows up. It takes pretty dark blinders to dispute that the consumer will never show up online... why procrastinate?
"With great power comes great responsibility" - spiderman
The hard part about APIs is that they essentially are a "contract" with both a developer and the application's user base. Developers have faith that the API will provide what the documentation says it will in order to provide a value add for a site's customers. APIs that break applications because of poor documentation, changing interfaces/outputs, or, in an online app such as twitter, providing insufficient uptime, an API provider can quickly destroy any cottage industry that it creates by not honoring this unspoken contract. If the API isnt available to the point that apps built on top of it fails, then ultimately users will suffer.
This is not an issue with large well funded orgs such NYT or Google...you know that the API will be there when needed.
That said, there are several great candidates for APIs in the online real estate space in my opinion. You work with or have worked with a number of them, Pat.
Our view of the problem specific to the real estate industry with respect to APIs is the focus on far more inflexible feeds where the ideal API can/should provide some value add beyond just being a feed alternative. You'll see much more on this topic from us in the coming weeks.
Tony
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Just as a followup, we'll be releasing the first Vidlisting multimedia API interfaces later this week (http://forsalebylocals.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/first-version-of-our-multimedia-social-network-api-to-release-this-week/)
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