I've been thinking about APIs recently and how they are used often as the basis of a business. Many companies have been launched which are based solely on the data coming from another company through an API (think Twitter and Facebook). Some branched out and survived the inevitable clash with the hand that feeds them, but I wonder how much each of them made before they were forced to look elsewhere. Guys like Paul Graham who invest in tech startups spend a lot of money in a bunch of different companies because they know that even if 99/100 of them fail they will more than recoup their investment with the 1/100 that doesn't. I wonder if one could make a company that specialized in making products with the APIs of other companies but had enough of variety that they could survive most of them cutting them off.