It'd be rad if you could integrate with Genius' API in such a way that if they ever shut it down, or you want to switch to another annotation service for any reason, you would only have to point to another annotation provider instead of rewriting all the syntax/semantics of the integration.
Sound cool? Get involved with:
* W3C Web Annotation WG: http://www.w3.org/annotation/
* OpenAnnotation Ontology: http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/
* W3C Social WG and Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-activitystreams-vocabulary-2015...
Feel free to try an alternative, open annotation api, like ours: api.hypothes.is
What kind of tech stack do you run? Last time I check it was mostly Javascript (ugh).
And I can't blame the companies for making that decision either, why should the company serve your app if they're not even getting any traffic from it? Which would be a logical argument, except these companies open up their APIs and act like they are ok with it at first, and developers spend time building on top of them, creating even more useful services, making the original company even more popular, and then after those companies benefit from these developers, they shut them down.
This is similar to what happened in this case, which I think was a complete dick move by Soundcloud: https://medium.com/@padschneider/r-i-p-soundflake-79f7cf5f9d...
I was super bummed when it happened because I use Soundcloud a lot and their app has some serious issues. I was considering building my own client, but then saw that these guys built a really nice alternative. Sadly it got shutdown shortly after.
Which is exactly what they want. They don't want people scaling and running huge businesses off their API, they want lots of little experiments by people messing around. They can see what gains traction and then copy it. It's like a free startup incubator and your investment is the time your engineers spend keeping the API up.
Hello. Welcome to every API ever.
I do wonder though how they will react to people using the API to make money off a webpage or an app.
