This is going to be the norm now for commerce sites, but eBay finally dropped the fees for use of their third-party commerce APIs. These are the things that allow third parties to create applications and tools that lead people into eBay or, say, Amazon. Amazon is the most commonly used API, I would think, as so many tools integrate calls to the API directly.

It will be interesting to see if non-commerce sites get into the API business in a big way. Not sure what they’d do, exactly, but I’m still curious. For example, what APIs could ESPN.com offer? Since revenue is made via advertising, mostly, those hits and impressions count.