John Musser, April 2nd, 2008 Comments(1)

40 new APIs per month. That’s how many APIs we’ve seen added to our API directory at ProgrammableWeb in each of the first 3 months of 2008. 120 APIs in Q1. That’s a growth rate that’s 150% greater than a year ago. They run the gamut from APIs from small startups to big social networks to a steady stream of new APIs from Google, Microsoft and the other major Internet players. For a sense of which categories have the most competing APIs see the chart below which shows the number of web APIs (that is, companies with platforms) in each of the top 15 categories:

As the universe of APIs continue to grow we’ve been adding new ways to find and track them. The first of these is an advanced API search feature that let’s you find APIs by tag (ex: video), category, protocol, or date added. Here’s a sample:

REST: 413 APIs (not including AtomPub REST APIs).
SOAP: 181 APIs
JavaScript: 55 APIs
Show last 30 days

We’re also continuing to build-out our ‘verticals’ that track each of the API marketplaces with the greatest number of competitors and developer interest. There are now eight verticals, each with market-specific APIs, mashups, and related news:

To track competition among the big API providers there’s the API Scorecard that looks at which layers of the API stack Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AOL, and eBay are competing.

We have also enhanced our /code section with code-related resources and links, including language-specific collections like API wrappers for Ruby, PHP and others.

2008 is going to be busy here. More to come.