Eric Norlin at cloudave.com has pointed me to a great post over at digitalcapitalism.com called "API’s Are The New Marketing Platform"
In the post Kipp Bodnar a social marketing manager says;
"The future of marketing is about companies developing useful applications for their customers that extend web services that the customers are already using. This replaces the current model which is to use web applications to communication with customers. The problem with current social media marketing is the noise. A company is one of thousands, sometimes millions of users and it is easy to get lost. Developing applications via API’s provide a way for companies to break out of the crowd and at the same time create value for customers. Brands will need to become conduits that facilitate consumer communications instead or interrupters that intermittently drop in advertisements."
This is a very interesting concept which may well fit into the context of interoperability as a marketing tool. Lately it seems that a lot of the cloud providers are using their API as the basis for marketing their cloud offerings such as Google's recent attempt to bridge into your data center or even Microsoft's Software + Services strategy. Strange as it may sound, it's starting to look like the battle for the cloud may be won or lost on the API layer.
Read more at http://digitalcapitalism.com/2009/04/api-marketing/