Googles Embeddable Approach to the Civic Information API

by on 01/16/2013

I stumbled across the Google Civic Information API today, which allows developers to build applications around civic information including polling place, early vote location, candidate data, and election official information. As soon as I landed on the home page, I scanned the left hand navigation, and noticed the option for "embeddable tool". As you know embeddable tools are are something I advocate all API owners should consider when assembling the building blocks of your API. I like Google's approach to the Google Voter Information Tool, which lets users look up their polling place, early vote sites, ballot, and election official information for the US 2012 General Election. To support the embeddable tool, Google provides a quick overview, with instructions for "quick embed" and more granular options allowing anyone to configure region, address, local and other advanced settings.... read more.

Tags: Embeddable, Google

Netflix Storytelling And Why You Should Tell Stories of Your Platform

by on 01/10/2013

The mission of API Evangelist is centered around telling stories from the API space, shedding light on the innovative things developers and API providers are doing across all business sectors. Over the holidays I rolled my history of APIs series into its own section. It can be very difficult to understand who the players were in the API game, last year, let alone 10 years ago. If there aren’t stories about what happened in 2001, it can be very difficult to piece together the history. In 2012 I also scaled up my API monitoring system to track the blogs and tweets of over 1000 APIs, providing a way for me to track activity across the space and establish my own API ranking system resulting in what I cal the API Stack. This too is very dependent on API owners telling or sharing stories around their operations. I’m tracking on over 1500 APIs and only 1000 have blogs and Twitter accounts. With very few other signals to follow, such as stories in the blogosophere, social bookmarks on Hacker News and Reddit or QA on Quora or Stack Overflow--there isn’t much to discover about these potentially valuable APIs. At first, I felt there was a flaw in the way I track on APIs.... read more.

Tags: Blogging, Netflix, Storytelling

In API We Trust

by on 01/09/2013

If you've met me in person, you know I always wear my logo on my t-shirt.  I'm not a graphic designer, and when I needed a logo for API Evangelist, I just wrapped the words in JSON and called it good.  It has stuck.   When I was in France speaking at API Days, the art director at faberNovel drew some very cool sketches of me.  He recently followed up with some more high resolution images I can use for t-shirts.   Very cool! Thank you so much Benoit Talabot and faberNovel!... read more.

Tags: API Days, Faber Novel, In API We Trust, T-Shirts

Make Sure You Are At API Strategy & Practice in February

by on 01/07/2013

I'm rebooting the marketing and PR for the API Strategy & Practice conference after the holidayz. After finding a new date for the event on February 21st and 22nd, we've gone through the session and speaker lineup and almost the entire line-up is coming back, with a couple of new entries including a new keynote from Jeff Lawson of Twilio. We had a whole bunch of new requests for speaker additions over the holidays, and while we tried to squeeze in where we could, with such a killer lineup and the fact that everyone was committed to the new dates, we had to decline some pretty good talks. Over the next week we are going through and confirming with all registered attendees to verify they will be attending, but since the event was sold out before hurricane Sandy, I expect we will be announcing the event as sold out pretty soon. The event is designed to be an intimate 2 days between 300 industry professionals in the API space.... read more.

Tags: API Practice, API Strategy, Conference

API Evangelist in 2013

by on 01/01/2013

After looking back at 2012, I wanted a January 1, 2013 blog post for my blogs. My first blog post of 2012 was my tour schedule for January, 2012. While it was a pretty busy time for evangelizing and hackathons, I wanted something a little deeper. I’m not sure what, but I will play with the format year to year, until I find what I’m looking for. Every year I rewrite my bio, based upon where I am in my life. I’ve been doing this since 2009. This year I will write inaugural blog posts along with my bio reworking, and post to each of my active blogs. We’ll see if it resonates again in 12 months, and I do it again in 2014. API Evangelist is my obsession. I started the blog in summer of 2012, in an effort to reinvent myself and find a career path that didn’t just make sense for me, but also was something that would be around in a couple, while also returning something to society. I believe API Evangelist is on course to do just this. While focusing on the business of APIs, I am able to satisfy my sometimes ADD personality with a diverse range of subject areas ranging from social to the internet of things.... read more.

Tags: 2013, January

History of APIs: ProgrammableWeb

by on 12/30/2012

While writing about the history of APIs, it is easy to be so focused on just APIs, that you overlook the single most important player in the entire history of the web API--ProgrammableWeb. In July 2005, John Musser started ProgrammableWeb. According to his original about page: ProgrammableWeb is a web-as-platform reference site and blog delivering news, information and resources for developing applications using the Web 2. 0 APIs. I started this site because I couldn't find what I was looking for: a technology focused starting point for web platform development. (For a bit more see my initial post. ) Although no guarantees, the last time I started a reference site it somehow became Google's highest rated link on the topic. Given that this site will be a collaborative effort with community input as well, this can be what we make it. I hope you find the site useful. John Musser - Seattle, August 2005 I think John’s original blog post on why he started ProgrammableWeb, says it all: Why? Because going From Web Page to Web Platform is a big deal. Web APIs are a big deal!... read more.

Tags: Adam Duvander, History, John Musser, ProgrammableWeb

The Secret to a Successful API is Internal from #APIDays

by on 12/28/2012

Here is a video of one of my talks from API Days in Paris, France where I walked the internal side of APIs. This talk is derived from my post, the secret to amazons success is internal and stories I've written on Netflix's success with internal APIs. The presentation for this talk is available in my talks section at The Secret to a Successful ApI is Internal.... read more.

Tags: Amazon, API Days, Internal, Netflix

Insights From API Pioneers: Salesforce Developer Highlights of 2012

by on 12/28/2012

You can learn a lot from the history of APIs, and following what the pioneers are doing.  Salesforce isn't the coolest API within the Hacker News community, but when it comes to building an API ecosystem--Salesforce knows what they are doing. I was reading through the Salesforce top developers highlights of 2012.  Their highlights doesn't just showcase the success of the community, but what Salesforce feels is critical to keeping their ecosystem healthy.   800,000 developers and climbing: the Salesforce Platform Developer Community is growing at an unprecedented rate. Cool new Salesforce technologies: Identity, Salesforce Touch Platform, Force. com Canvas, and Java on Heroku for the Enterprise were released. Content is king: Great books such as The Salesforce Touch Platform Mobile Development Guide and Dan Appleman’s new book Advanced Apex Programming for Salesforce. com hit the shelves. Community is making noise: Salesforce Stack Exchange launched and is already at 1,000 users.  Developer User Groups have grown to 60 groups across the globe and climbing.... read more.

Tags: 2012, DeveloperForce, SalesForce

Five Areas of Collective Action Around Personal Data

by on 12/27/2012

I'm immersed in deep thought around my personal data, asking some important questions about my digital self--which includes the state of my online personal data. After reading 14 big trends to watch in 2013, by Alex Howard (@digiphile), I got immersed in World Economic Forums Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class paper. I'm still processing all of my thoughts around the paper, but one statement really stands out: The issues surrounding personal data – political, technological and commercial alike – are numerous and complex. The choices stakeholders make today will influence the personal data ecosystem for years to come. The World Economic Forum then outlines five key area that require action: Innovate around user-centricity and trust. The personal data ecosystem will be built on the trust and control individuals have in sharing their data. From a technological, policy and sociological sense all stakeholders need to embrace this construct. One particular area of focus is the continued testing and promoting of “trust frameworks” that explore innovative approaches for identity assurance at Internet scale Define global principles for using and sharing personal data.... read more.

Tags: Alex Howard, Education, Healthcare, Personal Data, Social, World Economic Forum

New API Stories in 2013

by on 12/27/2012

Storytelling in the API industry is critical to the healthy growth of the space. John Musser and ProgrammableWeb have been telling great stories in the tech industry, since way before APIs were all lthe rage they are now. While I was at API Days this year, I was speaking with Mike Amundsen (@mamund) of Layer7, and we started talking about how Amazon, Netflix (and I’d add Twilio) tend to dominate the API discussion. I considered my talks from API Days, and sure enough--Netflix and Amazon were in there multiple times! There are other stories we tell around Twitter, Facebook Google and other smaller APIs, but Amazon, Netflix and Twilio were cornerstones of API folklore in 2012. While I will keep telling these pillar stories (because they matter), as well as evolving other pioneers from my history of APIs section, I want to develop a fresh lineup of amazing API stories for 2013. Stories like Johnson Control's, Panoptix API, and how a 125 year old company can change their culture and embrace a new way of doing business via APIs. I will make sure there is easy access to the classic Amazon, Netflix and Twilio API stories.... read more.

Tags: Amazon, Johnson Controls, Netflix, Panoptix, stories, Twilio


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