Taobao.com, the largest domestic personal online trading community, has officially launched its Taobao Open Platform (thereinafter refer to as 'TOP') today, on which users can create various e-commerce applications through API opened by Taobao.
The TOP project is an open platform that Taobao Software Company opens for 3rd App developers and provides API interface and related develop environment. Through Taobao API Software developers can obtain Taobao's user information (the sellers and the buyers information, and authority needed if private information involved), commodity information (the whole information of names, categories, models, and introductions, etc. about over 100 million commodities on Taobao), commodity category information (the whole Taobao's commodity indexes and classification details), shop information (the whole Taobao's shops information), trading detail information (inquiry details of each trading with user's authority), commodity management (the interfaces to upload, edit and modify commodities, ect.), and create related e-commerce applications. Meanwhile, Ali Software Platform, as the unique cooperating platform with TOP project, has also played an important role in this project. It will provide a whole set of Taobao API additional services for developers: testing environment, technical advisory, product shelving, version control, charge strategy, marketing sales, and product assessment, etc.
Several months ago, Taobao Mall was just gorgeously launched and would challenge the international B2C giant Amazon. But under the situation that it hasn't attracted enough outside attentions, Taobao has again extended its product line and tried to become a public e-commerce platform through open API. And this unavoidably brings me various doubts. First of all, it needs to be emphasized that I hold a positive and optimistic attitude on the development that open platform gives to internet. However, I don't think any decision maker with open attitude should make his own community site like Facebook, the social network operation system. There are too many things to be considered, especially for Taobao.com, which owns over 62 million registered users and hundreds of thousands of long-term online trade sellers, and whose daily total trading amount exceeds 350 million yuan and daily trading number exceeds 1.5 million. Open platform seems not to promote the protection of those users data safety. On the contrary, if the bottom line of open degree is set irrationally, then such open platform will most probably become a fuse for users to outbreak the crisis of confidence on Taobao. At this point, I am personally quite conservative.