When ever I hear discussions on releasing version 1 APIs it's always accompanied by this genereal idea:
We can't release our API yet because we have to get it right the first time.
Here's a recent example by Vic Gundotra, but there re numerous others including Stackoverflow itself, back in the day before the API was released.
What I don't understand is, why does the first version have to be so "right"? With APIs you can implement versioning and good documentation, and if you do that well, which isn't that hard to do, why be so precious about the version 1 API?
From version to version, because it's versioned, the API can change dramatically without any breaking changes, since the old version is still supported. I was wondering why the big issue about releasing APIs..?