Ron Hornbaker

Om writes:

A lot of good things happened, innovation blossomed, but now we are entering a more pragmatic phase, where the large players like Google and Amazon who distributed the API elixir are taking control back.

Google My Maps is a case in point, where the company is competing with its “users.” Don’t worry – it won’t be the last time you will see Mountain View adopt tactics that in the past were associated with Microsoft. Keeping that $145 billion market capitalization intact is a bitch!

Google is not alone, as one of my readers points out. Michael Arrington has been following the feud between Amazon-owned Alexa.com and Alexaholic (or whatever it is being called this week.) In the end Alexaholic/Statsaholic features ended up becoming part of Alexa.com offering. Why let a little seemingly parasitic service live if you can make ad dollars off those page views?

See the full article at Web 2.0: End of Innocence. This whole ordeal certainly has erased whatever innocence I had about mashups, APIs, and the seemingly benign nature of large web companies.

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