When an open API isn’t really open
One of the recent projects we’ve become involved with uses search advertising APIs like the Google Adwords and Yahoo!s Overture. Usually you would assume that, given the nature of these two companies, the APIs could be used by anyone in any situation (naturally, given some restrictions) but we found something quite different. The so called open APIs for website advertisement management aren’t really that open.
Since this is developer access, you’d assume you’d access the developer website, get an SDK and check out documentation, get an API key and work from there. Sadly, that isn’t the case. With Adwords, in order to even get an API key, you first need to setup (and pay for) an advertisement campaing – even if you have nothing to sell. In fact, you get no access to anything remotely close to a developer API key without first giving out your credit card details.
Overture’s has a whole different problem – documentation and obscurity. Rolling among terms like a Search Ambassador (someone who manages client accounts for search marketing), getting somewhere conclusive is a bane. Clearly, things are still in a state where we need to overhype the words “manager” and “senior marketer”, because we need people who are paid to go over those pages and find something useful.
We need openness to really mean openness.
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Well, its done. Mike 
If there’s a time to invest on user experience, that time is now. With the abundance of companies and projects coming, left and right, into the “Web 2.0″ space – some already overlapping in feature-set and problems they’re solving -, there has to be something that gives a company the edge over competition. That would be user experience.
