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In some part I agree with you., but that's now. In the near future more and more services and apps will have an API as a primary way to be accessed by third pa
by sinzone 16y ago
In some part I agree with you., but that's now. In the near future more and more services and apps will have an API as a primary way to be accessed by third party developers.
Don't know if that will be your need since all depend from the service itself if it is useful or not. But we have to bear in mind that Twitter has 75% of its traffic coming from its APIs, while eBay has 8 billion of worth items pushed through the marketplace via APIs. That's the future, especially when the internet of things will come, at that point your toaster will have an API as well.
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoTwitter and eBay both had significant web presence and community before their APIs took off. So did Facebook. Only once you have something worth getting at will people want to integrate with you. To be fair, a lot of Twitter's success was due to their API, but without a decent minimal web presence, nobody would have signed up. Remember, everybody's first Twitter client was the web. If that sucked, or didn't exist, nobody would have bothered to pick up an API-based client.
- corin_ 16y agoHowever, Twitter later found that there were many problems with their system, and had to completely redo everything, to the point that '#newtwitter' now is just an interface that sits on top of their API. So maybe it would have actually been cheaper in the long run to have built a perfect API first, rather than a web service followed by an API.
- sinzone 16y agoYeah sure, even though nowadays more and more services where API IS the product are coming out...simplegeo, twilio, cloudant, mongohq, S3amazon...