App Center Best Practices

by on 05/16/2012

Last week Facebook announced a new App Center where developers can submit applications they've built.  Like any API owner, Facebook is looking for high quality applications to list in its directory and has published a list of App Center Best Practices: Websites must provide a personalized experience - All websites and mobile web apps need to immediately present authenticated users with a logged-in experience. Specifically, we’re looking for personalization, such as name and profile picture, so users know that their Facebook information is being used to create an account. Review your app settings - App detail pages are dynamic based on the integrations you’ve specified on the basic settings page of the Developer App.... read more.

Tags: App Center, Best Practices, Facebook

Products and Commerce with APIs

by on 05/16/2012

I am really starting to see my early visions of the Internet coming together. In my mind I see an interconnected world of products and commerce, where every business has an API. APIs finally seem to be maturing, reaching a point where they can deliver at the scale and reliability we need, to really make this happen. Three good examples of this are: The StructuredRetailProducts. com API - Providing to access to over 3 million individual product listings from 1700+ companies, representing total sales of over £3,382 billion and counting. Access 15+ years of product and market data across 72 different countries at the click of a button and get the latest data on sales volumes, activity levels, and market share.... read more.

Tags: e-commerce, Economy, Payments, Products

Developing More Meaningful API Metrics

by on 05/15/2012

API metrics are an essential, but what should we measure? There are two metrics that seems to dominate discussions about success of the API industry: Number of New API Registration Number of Daily and Monthly API Calls Every API I’ve consulted with, use the same two metrics, if they have any at all. The tech blogosphere (driven by API service providers) have created a so call billionaires club, showcasing APIs that have over a billion API calls within a day or month. Investors are even using the number of API calls as a metric to consider the valuation of a company, and seen as a good indicator of the demand for a company’s services.... read more.

Tags: API Metrics, Billionaires Club, Daily API Calls, Monthly API Calls, New Registrations

PeopleBrowsr API Restructures to Deliver More Meaning for Developers

by on 05/15/2012

Explaining to developers, what an API does, can be hard. How you describe your API, the underlying endpoints, can make or break user adoption. You shouldn’t be afraid to evolve, and keep trying to find the sweet spot in both the language and branding that you use in your API area. I saw an example of this today, with the restructuring of PeopleBrowsr's APis. When I first starting playing with PeopleBrowsr's APIs, they were broken into 3 separate APIs: PeopleBrowsr API Kredentials API Kred API On the surface its really hard to know what each of these APIs does, but after I dove in I saw lots of value within individual methods, but I really had to spend time, getting to know each method, one by one.... read more.

Tags: Influencers, Kred API, peoplebrowsr, Social Analytics, Social Insight, Social Media

USDA Releases API for Mandatory Livestock Reporting Data

by on 05/14/2012

USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) has released a new, publicly available web API for its Livestock Mandatory Reporting (LMR) system, offering access to all historical LMR data, allowing users to pull large amounts of customized data sets via a RESTful interface with JSON embedded URLs and XML formatted output. "The Livestock Mandatory Reporting program facilitates open, transparent price discovery and provides all market participants, both large and small, with comparable levels of market information for cattle, swine, sheep, beef and lamb meat," said Craig Morris, Deputy Administrator of the AMS Livestock and Seed Program.... read more.

Tags: Agricultural Marketing Service, AMS, Livestock Mandatory Reporting, USDA

APIs Have Been Copyrightable for 22 Years

by on 05/14/2012

I attended a great webinar put on by the folks at Apigee last week, where they discussed APIs & Copyright. A very timely discussion with the recent API copyright decision in the EU, and from the ongoing Oracle vs. Google case. As I process all discussions around API copyright, I’m going to publish relevant pieces here at API Voice, for everyone else to process along with me. One interesting piece of the Apigee discussion is that APIs have been copyrightable for the last 22 years--specifically referencing the JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC. v. PHOENIX CONTROL SYSTEMS, INC. from October 3rd, 1989.... read more.

Tags: copyright, Court, Google, Johnson Controls, Legal, Oracle, Phoenix Control Systems

API Innovation at the Edinburgh Festivals

by on 05/14/2012

I’m always on the hunt for API stories that capture the power of APIs, showcasing how they are transforming industries and businesses around the globe. Today, my global API monitoring platform picked up one such story in Edinburg, Scotland. In the summer of 2011, the summer-based Edinburgh Festivals made their event listings data publicly available for digital developers and technologists, via web APIs.... read more.

Tags: Arts, Edinburgh, Event, festival, International, Music, Sports

Making Your API Accessible to the Masses

by on 05/10/2012

There are a lot of high value APIs emerging these days, APIs with access to essential business data, resources and intelligence. When designing your API you want to make the interface as intuitive as possible, and ensure as wide as access to it as you possibly can.  To quote Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO regarding Java APIs: "We wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many people as possible,” Schwartz said. “You have open APIs and compete on implementations. " To do this, I encourage building tools and widgets that non-developers can use when working with your API. A great example of this is at Google, with their Google Analytics Dashboard Library.... read more.

Tags: Analytics, Building Blocks, Embeddable, Google, Site Metrics, Widgets

The Flora and Fauna of the Twitter Ecosystem

by on 05/07/2012

Twitter has an innovative approach to presenting the objects that make up the Twitter Platform. They have built a field guide to Twitter Platform objects, designed like an Audubon Society field guide, describing the four primaty Twitter objects: Tweets - Also known as a Status Update, Tweets are the basic atomic unit of all things Twitter. Users create Tweets. Tweets can be embedded, replied to, favorited, unfavorited, retweeted, unretweeted and deleted. Users - Users can be anyone or anything. They tweet, follow, create lists, have a home_timeline, can be mentioned, and can belooked up in bulk.... read more.

Tags: Entries, Objects, Places, Tweets, Twitter, Users

Curated API Industry News Feeds

by on 05/05/2012

In my Google Reader I curate hundreds of articles pulled from 600+ blogs and 25+ real-time Google Alerts, on a daily basis. Everything I star in my Google Reader or Tweet about daily ends up in my Pinboard account. In addition to this curation, I bookmark every relevant site and post I come across in my daily surfing using the Pinboard bookmarklet. Using the Pinboard API I setup a news curation system at API Evangelist which pulls my latest pinboards every 15 minutes and adds them to a curation queue which I monitor every couple hours. My API Evangelist curation system allows me to add comments and tags, further adding meaning to what I’ve already read throughout the day.... read more.

Tags: API Industry, API News, curation, Pinboard, Tweets


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