API Predictions

This is a fantasy view of the future inspired by talking with people at APIdays. It’s a personal view and best read as science-ficiton, but you never know, some of it may come true!

NOW

Predictions in this section seem fairly likely to happen if not happening already

A few branded, skyscraper APIs will continue to be dominant and used by the vast majority of apps. The number of skyscapers will represent a tiny minority of the total APIs publically available.
The dx (developer experience) movement will get into full swing and impact the API design space.
Hypermedia will formalise itself as a series of Architectural Design Patterns. See [1], [2] and [3] for examples.
HTML5 and websockets will spawn a new generation of real-time APIs

These predictions are not happening yet, but reasonably likely to come into place

Apigee will have been acquired.
Twitter will win back their developer community.
NodeJs applications such as deployd [4] will continue to drive down availability of XML representations. XML may disappear from the majority of public APIs, but will continue to live-on in bespoke partner and private APIs.
ProgrammableWeb will become obsolete. Instead there will be a new generation of API discovery tools [5]
There will be a significant increase in the number of stand-alone API providers such as Twilio. (Twilio is a stand-alone API provider because it doesn’t have a core product in the way that Google, Facebook and Twitter do.)
An open-source and independent solution for API traffic management will become available, perhaps based on [6]. API clients will become more adept at self-managing load.
APIs will provide text/html as their default content-type (because humans need to understand them before the machines can get started).
There will be a single go-to place for API developers to social network (and it won’t be Facebook).
API security will change radically in response to the general availability of personally available hardware/mobile tokenisers.
Commercial monitoring tools will get-in on the API act. Their solutions will provide views of how a single request passes through the technology stack. The apiKey will provide the glue.

FUTURE

Predictions that will probably never happen, perhaps this is a wish-list ..

W3C will publish an API standard that is largely driven by Hypermedia and the requirements of the API clients. Kin Lane [7] will be involved!
Semantic Web will align with a new generation of media-types that arise from the rising popularity of the Hypermedia style. A standard representation for RDF and JSON will emerge, driven by a skyscaper API provider and (eventually) blessed by W3C.
A famous legal battle will project the issue of API provenance into the media. Digital signature solutions will evolve and adapt themselves to the API economy.
Single Page Applications (SPAs) will be the accepted alternative to traditional page-based web sites. SPAs will use registered media-types.
The Great-Twitter-Betrayal will give rise to a credit-rating style system. This system will make promises to Venture Capitalists and make them feel better about manging risk in the API economy. Everyone else will ignore it.
Software tools for API management (see [8] and [9]) are provided out-of-the-box by the majority of cloud vendors.
Delays in the transition from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2.0 will engender the adoption of a new protocol that will be optimised for API traffic and messaging.
A single supplier will capture the market for API developer portals