The story of a transforming service is always a fascinating one. The product strategists and owners of our times are facing with one interesting challenge: we're to cater for those who have visions of sophisticated APIs as well as those who don't know what an API is. The magical decade of internet brings us the same information in multiple delivery mechanism: books, files, wikis, APIs. Not contradicting - complementing. Many audiences, many consumption behaviors, many services - the three components that make up our daily work-life.

In my comment on Constance's blog I have referred to a comment which answers a similar question to that raised in 'Answer Maven', where Martindale-Hubbell's Dave Danielson details the various ways in which Martindale-Hubbell information and data are powering other services and uses and makes a point of listening to audience to further develop our products. Martindale's products are developing and changing, collaborating with other services to maximize benefit to the user, e.g. seeing shared LinkedIn connections on your listing and profile - and this is just a small example.

It'll be hard for me to write a post without referring specifically to Connected. Connected is indeed just part of the bigger set - and though is only formally launched in March this year, it growing very quickly: from 3,000 to 17,000 members in very few months, hundreds of user generated groups, and we're starting to see some great bubbling forum conversations. Yes, we have more we can do with it, and we're working daily to make it more useful and exciting for our members.

There is so much we want to and can do, so the more we hear from our audience, those who blog as well as those still prefer using a rollerdex, the better. Specifically I really want to hear about more detailed use cases for using the Marindale-Hubbell services and information in different ways. Looking forward to read comments to this post.

Many of those alliance partnerships LexisNexis' Dave Danielson dscusses have been in place for years. All the while the target audience of LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell believes the directory is of declining value.

If Martindale has to pay those alliance partners anything for the lawyer directory being displayed at partner sites, that also increases the subscription prices MH is charging lawyers. An open API would not cost anything.

MH Connected does have over 10,000 registered users, but many of those users, like at other places, register to see what's there and then move on. I don't hear a whole of buzz at legal conferences or in law offices about the value of Connected. Connected may grow and offer some value in time, but it's not going to alter the thinking of a managing partner who has decided to stop paying MH $150,000 per year.

New technology and user behavior of the conversational and aggregated web is making us Product Planners feel like kids in a candy store - APIs is one of many things we want to put our hands on. And with the myriad of information tied to different services - and I can think of many only with Connected - there is a lot that can be developed and offered: listings, articles (hundreds a month), community content, groups, reviews, ratings, etc. The key thing is to develop something that will be of real service to the product users.

As we're baking our new surprises, I'll reiterate my last comment and ask to use this opportunity to hear more specific use cases and user needs from our audience in general and the readers of this blog specifically.

In fact, as we're blogging, our team is engaging with our users to get feedback on current and future offerings via usability tests, face-to-face conversations, listening and responding to legal blogs, forum convos and tweets - armed with that feedback we can develop the best offering to service our members.

BTW, tomorrow I will be visiting the Social Media Risks and Rewards conferences in NY. This could be a great opportunity for some more fruitful and direct dialogue on product features. Kevin I know you are not attending this, but if any of the readers are attending the conference and have ideas, feedback and suggestions for APIs or in general - tomorrow could be a great opportunity to discuss. Send me a tweet (@alinwagnerlahmy )or a message in Connected, if you want to meet.

You can talk to users and do usability groups, but why doesn't Martindale open up its directory to everyone and all developers via an API? That's a business decision that doesn't need a lot of feedback from lots of people.

As you know Ali, I like what you are doing, but it seems you're dodging the question here. Perhaps someone else at MH can share their thoughts.