The cloud is where it’s at. It’s where business data resides. It’s where social user-generated content sits, where forward-thinking creators place their tools. Unfortunately, the cloud is also the place all that good stuff stays, unused and unloved. That is, unless you offer smart ways to access it. That is where a web API comes in.
Just as the power of crowds has populated the social content repositories of Web 2.0 -- YouTube videos, Facebook updates, tweets, and more -- the web API enables designers and developers to re-purpose the body of knowledge that is the cloud. Here are some examples of how companies have used a web API to create more value.
Mashups: The Google Maps API enables mashups of any location-based data, creating new layers which can be displayed on a map in an app. The Google Map API is the most used web API.
Social Feedback: The Facebook Graph API powers "like" buttons in apps, and much more. It enables consistent access to objects in their system (people, photos, events, and pages) and lets developers also access the connections between them (friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).
Business Tools: Salesforce.com opened their core services to partners via API, enabling them to innovate and extend Salesforce services. API traffic to Salesforce accounts for more than 60% of total Salesforce traffic.
Commerce: eBay alone has a developer community of more than 800,000 members using its APIs. With eBay APIs, developers can display eBay listings, get bidder information for sold items, get the current list of eBay categories, leave feedback about users, and submit new items for sale.
Network Operators: AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, and others are getting in the game with APIs exposing network resources, including SMS and carrier-billing for in-app purchase. AT&T, for example, recently published more than a hundred public network APIs to stimulate app development.
These examples are just a small sampling of API creation and usage. The larger picture can be seen at ProgrammableWeb, which catalogs more than 6,000 public web APIs.
From these examples we can see the following:
An API may expose business data such as customer data in apps only intended for internal sales staff use.
APIs may be deployed privately -- for internal or partner use -- or publicly for broadest dissemination. Businesses are enabling “citizen developers” across the enterprise to create their own apps using secure, private APIs internally or among business partners. Public APIs, such as those listed on the ProgrammableWeb, enable new and interesting uses of existing web resources.
Mash-ups are driven by APIs. APIs determine the resources available for the re-mixing of content.
Designer/developer teams are the new creative crowd, driving access to content in innovative ways.
As businesses ask “What’s our mobile strategy?” the API is a significant part of the answer. Businesses that don’t offer their resources via API, to be mined by the innovative worldwide community of developers, will be left behind.