History of APIs - Birth through Social

by Kin Lane on 02/10/2011

We hear a lot of talk about companies that were pioneers in the API space. In an ongoing series we want to try to document the story behind these pioneers, and we are calling it History of APIs.

So far we've covered what we consider the early innovators of the modern web API:

Salesforce - February, 2000
Ebay - November, 2000
Amazon E-Commerce - July, 2002

We call this the birth period of the modern API movement. Salesforce, Ebay, and Amazon were the leaders of this movement and set the stage for the social period of the modern API movement.

The social period had one clear pioneer:

Flickr - February, 2004

Flickr was the clear leader in redefining what APIs could be used for, and establishing the RESTful movement with their dead simple API.

The next major players in the social period were:

Twitter - September, 2006
Facebook - August, 2006
Google Maps - June, 2006

There are definitely other players in the social API period, but Twitter and Facebook obviously have come out as the clear leaders.

Google Maps definitely pushed the definition of what an API could do with their explosive mapping API that is the favorite of API mashups.

We'll continue to define how API pioneers changed the way we see the web into the API period dominated by cloud computing.

History of APIs - Twitter (apievangelist.com)
Instapaper API Goes Read/Write, But Only For Paying Users (programmableweb.com)
History of APIs - Google Maps API (apievangelist.com)

Tags:

API Evangelist, APIs, Ebay, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Google Maps, History, SalesForce, Social, Twitter

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