I’m in the middle of playing with a service called Dapper. As I understand it at the moment, the app allows me to click elements on a web page–and works best if there a few similarily constructed ones–and use the information as building blocks. In other words, it’s a non-programmer interface for the data of the web–which then can be remixed, mashed, and grouped. It’s roll your own API.

So what’s the big deal? I’m not sure there is a big deal in that anything I’m doing with the service can already be done hacking the html, xhtml, or xml and writing code around it. However, it does democratize API building by inviting more people to hack the web. But here’s my cut on it: Nothing I create using this will be as good as a novice to expert could make using Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.

However, there is value to this–and in the Long Tail frame of mind, what publishing dapplications might do is lead real developers to create more robust and usable apis. Dapper could be a discovery engine for api demand–which then developers can use to create actual solutions for.

I may have more thoughts on this as I play with the service. But for now, if nothing else, it’s a wicked creative idea, if nothing else.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 5:48 am and is filed under Tech. It is further classified using the following tags api, dapper, longtail, Tech, ugc and web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.