Banner demos of CiviCRM ( www.openngo.org ), SalesForce.com, Flock ( www.flock.com ), and www.geocoder.us (a free lat/long geocoder) were given at then NTEN conference on Emerging Technologies. They made a clear and persuasive case for creating and using open apis to integrate and extend applications. CiviCRM used geocoder.us to geocode addresses and then used the google maps api to display them. All on the fly. The approach is sensible and efficient -- expose additional, non-taxing methods for others to grow usage and extend your applications, and extend your own without needing to reinvent the wheel. Since there was no time during the session for any questions on the downsides or limitations or dependency issues that arise with intimate use of open apis, that's what I'm most curious about. What happens to your application when the server for an API you rely on is down, or responds with long delays? How are interapplication permissions issues and security issues addressed? SalesForce, as a more mature, enterprise-level application uses their API to catalyze partnerships with other business service providers on a profit-making basis, so I'm thinking that surely they have standards for their partners' reliability, and the ability to change those as needed. Overall it does look like this is a clearly viable paradigm, and likely this will be an approach that can be used to connect nonprofit sector applications.
And Flock, built on top of Firefox, represents a very interesting new coalescence of blog, social bookmarking and tagging, and browser, showing that integration between these tools can be made very neatly and tightly at the browser. I'm looking forward to seeing more about this.