Amazon led the way into a new online-shopping frontier with their Web Services initiative. They opened their product database and fulfillment engine and allowed creative folks to build new ways to shop online. Successful innovations will surely find their way into Amazon’s application portfolio one way or another. In addition, AWS further extended Amazon’s reach into the online shopping world by creating virtual Amazon’s everywhere. Brilliant!

It seems everyone thinks that this model may have merit. Yahoo, with their developer network initiative, and Google, with their Google Web API’s, are also giving open data a try. RSS has taken off over the last year. The examples are endless.

I think everyone is right. Although giving data away for free seems very similar to the drug dealer model of “free for now, pay later”, in the end, I think that these programs will be successful for their initiators, and they will not pull the plug on their resellers or even worse, start charging them.

I applaud these data dealers and am looking forward to following how their openness initiatives impact their businesses, and the rest of the World Wide Web, over the next year.

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