“With the frequent, often last minute, changes in content flow the title expiration data available through our API has been inaccurate, so we have decided to no longer publish this information,” a Netflix spokesperson said via email. The company’s Director of Engineering – API Daniel Jacobson reiterated this point in a post on the company’s developer blog, adding that members will still be able to find the expiration date for each movie or TV show episode on the title’s web page.

The move will likely impact a number of third-party services, and comes two months after Netflix essentially closed its public API to all newcomers. Back in March, Netflix said that it was no longer issuing new API keys because the way the company was changing the API had changed: Initially meant to enable third-party apps, Netflix’s API has been playing a key component for the technology behind the company’s streaming service.

Restrictions to public APIs have been a common pattern for companies like Netflix and Twitter in recent months, but it looks like there may have been another reason for Monday’s changes: Netflix took a number of titles off its catalog in early May, leading some publications to write about “the great Netflix Instant vanishing of 2013” or even a “Streamageddon purge.”

Not all of those stories were completely accurate. Some reported a number of 2000 titles disappearing, but Deadline put the number close to 1000. And reports that Warner was pulling titles off of Netflix to power its own streaming service were quickly denied by the studio.

Netflix clearly wasn’t happy about all that streamageddon talk. Now it looks like it pulled the plug on another part of its API to prevent us from freaking out in the future — like at the end of the month, when a number of Viacom shows are set to disappear from the service.

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With this acquisition MuleSoft gets a popular online site used by web, mobile and other developers who want to connect their applications to third-party applications and data sources. San Francisco-based MuleSoft paints itself as a de facto hub for new-fangled web and mobile APIs as well as the more mature APIs behind enterprise applications.  It’s a wide world. MuleSoft estimates there are more than 13,000 active APIs  currently.

What ProgrammableWeb brings to the table is a sort of white pages directory of APIs, said Richard Seroter, a product manager for Tier 3, who uses the service. ProgrammableWeb has “lots of API content on the blog and is a good source of stats on API proliferation,” he said via Twitter.

The Next Web reported Tuesday morning that Alcatel-Lucent bought ProgrammableWeb three years ago; but i just double checked and there is no reference in MuleSoft’s statement about Alca-Lu ownership. I’ve asked MuleSoft for follow up and will update this when I hear.

Update: And … here’s the statement emailed from MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott:

“ProgrammableWeb was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2010 and was operating as an independent subsidiary with a separate url, brand, etc. MuleSoft acquired ProgrammableWeb from Alcatel-Lucent and plans to continue to run ProgrammableWeb as an independant business unit.”

This news comes a day after CA Technologies bought Layer 7, an API management company and five days after Intel purchased Mashery, another API management company.

This story was updated at 9:22 a.m. PST with the Next Web link and again at 9:43 a.m. PST with MuleSoft’s comment on Alcatel-Lucent’s ownership of ProgrammableWeb.

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Successful implementations of APIs enable applications to talk to each other and share data with other authorized applications. And, according to CA:

“the combination of CA and Layer 7 solutions will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and deliver more confidently and quickly the cloud, mobile and composite applications that run today’s business services.”

As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham explained last year: APIs are “the connective tissue of the cloud.” A company can offer API access to its own web services or data either “for a fee or as a way of building out its own platform,” she wrote. Amazon, for example, publishes APIs to its own web services to enable customers to make use of those web services.

As an example, if you have an app for Acme Airlines that alerts you of flight delays or changes, that app was enabled by Acme’s APIs. The availability of well-written and documented APIs can build a network effect around the services themselves, making them more ubiquitous and potentially more valuable to users. Companies like Mashery, Layer 7, Apigee and Mulesoft make sure their customers’ APIs are well crafted to enable the smooth flow of authorized information to flow from one application to another.

The news of the buyout, terms of which were not disclosed, comes out of CA World, the company’s annual customer conference in Las Vegas. It’s a big week for legacy IT players to buy stuff: Earlier on Monday CA rival IBM said it’s purchasing UrbanCode to bolster its devops expertise.

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MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott

MuleSoft also announced its new “Anypoint Platform” which it paints as the hub for connecting elderly on-premises applications to the shiny, newer mobile and web-based apps that companies increasingly turn to.

The company supports all the major  publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs) — no mean feat since by its count there are about 13,000 of them now, up from about 100 in 2006. Back then, only new-fangled companies like Yahoo Amazon, and eBay offered APIs as a standard way to interact with their applications.

“The new enterprise feels different. You still have legacy stuff that needs to be connected to your newer SaaS and mobile platforms. Anypoint provides the blueprint to connect all that up,” said Ross Mason, MuleSoft founder and CTO said in an interview.

MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott said the business of connecting all these enterprise applications represents a $500 billion opportunity, but one for which it must compete with a bunch of legacy vendors including Tibco and IBM (with its wild world of WebSphere). In some areas it also competes with newer companies like Apigee, but mostly MuleSoft’s SaaS solution gives companies an option other than turning to third-party systems integrators or hand coding connections between applications.

Salesforce.com is also a new investor in this round joining previous funders  Hummer Winblad, Morganthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners.

The latest cash infusion will help the company build up its sales and marketing presence and to keep building up its product. “We’re investing extremely heavily, this is all subscription based revenue which means this is a cash-consuming businesses,” Schott said.

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Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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“The idea is simple. The third-party application runs in an HTML iframe on YouTube. The user creates a video with the application, and then the application uploads the video to YouTube for the user to watch and share.”

However, it looks like Create never got all that much traction, which is why YouTube is now shutting the showcase down on January 31. Apps featured on Create will still be able to make use of the YouTube API after that date, which allows them to essentially operate as external third-party video editors for the site, complete with an option to upload edited videos directly to YouTube.

Only, they’re not going to be featured on YouTube anymore, and there’s no iframe integration either – and that irks some if the existing Create partners. “We think it’s a pity that the program is ending, as it provided YouTube users with a variety of easy-to-find options for video creation and production,” WeVideo Vice President of Sales and Marketing Mark Floisand told me via email.

YouTube has in recent months significantly expanded its own video editor, which users of the site can access during the upload process, so featuring competing apps may make less sense for YouTube. Still, one shouldn’t rule out that YouTube might bring back a tighter integration of some of these third-party apps in the future.

Image courtesy of Flickr user lorraine santana.

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Netflix Engineer Ben Christensen explained Hystrix thusly in a blog post on Monday:

Hystrix is a library designed to control the interactions between these distributed services providing greater tolerance of latency and failure. Hystrix does this by isolating points of access between the services, stopping cascading failures across them, and providing fallback options, all of which improve the system’s overall resiliency.

Hystrix actually stems from earlier work to add resilience to the Netflix API, the means by which many customer-facing applications access the services they need to run. As Christensen explained in a February 2012 blog post, services are distributed across thousands of instances in AWS, and if there are problems with those services — such as high latency or failed connections between them — it can wreak havoc on the Netflix API and seriously affect the performance of all the applications that depend on it.

Source: Netflix (https://speakerdeck.com/benjchristensen/performance-and-fault-tolerance-for-the-netflix-api-august-2012)

And, as he notes in that February post, “Intermittent failure is guaranteed with this many variables, even if every dependency itself has excellent availability and uptime … Thus, it is a requirement of high volume, high availability applications to build fault tolerance into their architecture and not expect infrastructure to solve it for them.”

Distributed systems are hard work to build and manage — ask anyone at Yahoo, Google or Facebook — and building distributed, service-oriented applications on top of those systems is probably no less difficult. Netflix has an even more-novel challenge because it opted to host all of its applications and services in the cloud, which provides some great tools for maximizing uptime but also some new layers of complexity in application architecture. The company’s focus on building resilient apps has been core to its ability to survive most of AWS’s cloud outages with little or no significant downtime.

In fact, Obama for America CTO Harper Reed told me during a post-election interview that Netflix tools and techniques helped the president’s AWS-hosted applications stay up and running even during three outages between late June and Nov. 6. Netflix has also open-sourced its Eureka load-balancing technology, its Edda dynamic querying tool, its Asgard management console and its lauded Chaos Monkey for testing application resilience.

It’s no surprise then that Netflix is something of a shining star at the AWS: Reinvent user conference in Las Vegas this week (CEO Reed Hastings will take the stage long with numerous engineers), prompting some to refer to it jokingly as a Netflix technology conference. Not that it’s an insult to anybody — Amazon and other infrastructure-as-a-service providers rent virtual servers, networks and management tools, but it takes cutting-edge users to engineer apps that can make the most of them.

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A  valuable API could drive revenue by enabling new functionality or tap new data sources and surface that information in new or existing applications. “If you know Data.gov, they made public all sorts of sensor data through their APIs,” Mason said. “The government won’t innovate on that data but developers can use that along with other interesting information to drive great new applications.”

APIs need to be managed just like products, said Anant Jhingran, VP of Data for Apigee. “You need to follow the feedback and understand what kinds of business is being driven by it.”

Twilio, an API that enables developers to write telephony-enabled applications, was cited several times as a successful API.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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Within a day, major tech publications such as Gizmodo and The Verge had picked up on it, rightly noting how much fun it is to check out the Instagrammed interiors of nearby buildings.

A terrific start for Worldcam, of course, except… this:

aaaaaaand we hit the 5000 / hour api rate limit of instagram. well well. back in an hour.

— Oskar Sundberg (@Gori) October 3, 2012

Shit. The article in Gizmodo generated so many visits we maxed out our API requests for both 4sq and Instagram. Being popular is a bitch.

— Per Stenius (@Fimpen) October 3, 2012

Worldcam wasn’t completely killed, but it did find itself going down roughly each hour, depending on the time of day. Sundberg and Stenius had hit the most fundamental quandary of the modern internet service.

“It’s both a really good thing and a bad thing about how internet technology works nowadays,” Sundberg told me today. “It opens up so much, but of course it also means your site is built on their platform, so you have to abide by their rules.”

Luckily for the Swedish pair, they found it pretty easy to get in touch with Foursquare, which increased Worldcam’s API limit tenfold as soon as they heard of the problems. Instagram has proved “harder to reach”, meaning they’re still stuck with the API limit of 5,000 requests an hour – a pretty low limit for a service that uses a few requests per page.

But for those wondering if Worldcam shouldn’t have checked out the landscape before going live, there are a couple of things to consider. First off, Worldcam isn’t a startup – these are two friends having fun with a side-project.

Secondly, they’ve been here before. Stenius and Sundberg were also behind a neat little tool called Is It Old?, which gave people a way to check if the link they were about to tweet had already been tweeted by someone else.

That tapped into Tweetmeme’s API, which in turn plugged into Twitter’s API. When Twitter decided to renounce its open nature in August, Is It Old? was one of several immediate casualties. Dead, just like that.

So it was hardly a surprise when similar trouble struck again. They knew what was going to happen. Indeed, Sundberg noted that Worldcam could get a higher API limit if it allowed an Instagram login, but said he didn’t want the service to require any login at all.

“It’s a luxury you have with doing it as a hobby,” he said. “If I was to dedicate my full time to something like this… I would recommend that you check those things before you build a business around it.”

There’s a reason why the smart startups are making themselves as platform-agnostic as possible. As for Worldcam, well, the service isn’t going to go away – indeed, they’re working on an app to accompany the web version – but it’s probably a good thing that the investment was limited to a little hobby time.

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