Calling it “Web 2.0” has always seemed, to me, to be a desperate attempt to create a rather tenuous and artificial distinction between parts of the Web market. On the other hand, I guess it acts as a rallying flag for market participants to make noise about.

If we had to pick watersheds in the Web marketplace, what would they be? I’d say that the rise of XML, AJAX, sophisticated Flash components, Web APIs, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have been the biggest drivers.

The Web API market is still evolving rapidly and how these services will be used is still in flux. In an attempt to bring some commercial structure into what has been as very chaotic segment comes the wonderfully named Mashery.

Mashery explains, its services allow “your company to build and control your API channels without burdening in-house staff with the headaches of access control, usage measurement and community management.” In other words, Mashery provides all of the customer-facing functionality and management leaving companies that provide Web services.

Mashery’s services provide rules-based customer provisioning, developer registration and key issuance, authentication (native and third party), proxy filtering to blocks malformed requests from reaching your API server, security access reports, metrics, audit logs, “intelligent” caching, usage throttling and limiting, and rules-based charging and billing.

Mashery’s service doesn’t require developers to change their APIs, and could be thought of as a management overlay that can be easily applied to any Web service.

You can find more information on Mashery’s technology and business, which is in beta. Pricing for Web API providers hasn't been set yet.

Mashery’s customer list is interesting and includes Cambrian House, a “crowdsourcing” service; FreeWebs, which provides multimedia publishing services; and Loomia, which provides recommendations and personalization services.

If Mashery can demonstrate that they add measurable value to the Web service publishing market then they could be a prototype for a new market, Web services brokerage. It remains to be seen how the value chain (Web service provider to Mashery to service integrator to end user) works out and how that affects pricing. If the economics are realistic, Mashery could be pivotal in the, ahem, Web 2.0 market.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.