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Comment by ozten | Hacker News Reader

I thought this would be about the glory days of “Mash-ups” using web APIs. Flickr + Twitter + Delicious tags to create a new experience. 2007 ? What a period to be a hacker!

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If we could *force* all the walled gardens to have an open API again, like some of them had back in the day, that would solve soooo many issues.

Make all the data free to use for everyone, while ML techniques get even more accessible, and let people build products with that - where they also have to provide APIs for their enriched data.

Even at the time, html scraping was necessary for a lot of things. And lots of services that has open APIs requires access keys. I'm allowed to read your twitter feed in html anonymously, but for json I need to apply for an account in advance and login, for example. Even if we could force open APIs, it's not sufficient.

We can, via policy and regulations! EU would be your best bet for lobbying, as Open Data is already mandatory for public data, and an extension to some privately produced data is not out of the question (it was discussed for transport data for example, ie. Uber data)

I suspect part of why they closed open APIs down is because it was abused (for spam or similar). Not sure how to convince them to open it back up in light of that.

Require registration of an account tied to a real person or organization for access to data.

Oh those were the days. Yahoo pipes and all of the various mashups. Then the walls started closing in :(

And that is not dead either, in fact it is better because you can just self-host https://nodered.org/

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