Whenever you build a service in someone else&#x27;s garden, there&#x27;s always the (fairly high) chance that you&#x27;ll be booted out at some stage.<p>In a sense, platform APIs allow the platform owner to understand what customers want without needing to deploy product talent to deploy it. Twitter has perfected this strategy. As soon as a third party comes up with a neat idea with your API, you can build your own &quot;official&quot; version of their app, throttle their usage and hopefully their business model.