3 ms·
Twitter 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
by MicahWedemeyer 16y ago
Twitter 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...