Jeffrey McManus

I work worked in developer relations at eBay. One of the things that I do here (besides get coffee and take dictation) is to make it easier for third-party developers to write software applications that incorporate the eBay marketplace. You didn’t realize that it’s possible to write software applications that incorporate the eBay marketplace? Neither do a lot of people. So it’s a darned good thing they hired me.

All this week I’m talking to developers who have licensed the API but haven’t launched applications yet. Usually people pay money to license our API (although it’s now free to get started). So that means that if you licensed the API like a year ago but haven’t launched an app yet, something’s goofy. My job is to figure out what that goofiness is, exactly. Fortunately for us, not many of the companies I’m talking to are saying that there’s anything wrong with the API itself, which is good I guess.

The API has got some goodness to it for sure. I gave a demo of a particular feature of the eBay API (SOAP-based callbacks from eBay to your Web server to provide alerts for interesting events such as the end of an auction) at VSLive NYC back in July. Maybe if I get all motivated I’ll plunge into the API documentation and dissect the calls one by one kinda like the way Don Box does with obscure .NET framework calls.