Last April we wrote about How Twitter’s 1 API Gave Birth to 43 New APIs. One year later, there are now 86 Twitter-derived APIs in our directory. The growth of Twitter-based APIs outpaced Twitter mashups, an area we also saw a lot of growth. There are now nearly 600 Twitter mashups. It wasn’t even a year ago that we marked the 400 Twitter mashup milestone.
Business models were nascent in 2005, when ProgrammableWeb listed only 105 APIs in our directory. There were only four basic models, according to John Musser’s talk this morning at Glue. Fast forward six years and those same business models exist, but there’s a lot more detail, as the now 3,000+ APIs have refined the ways an API can make money.
Simplicity wins again. Much as there are more RESTful APIs than SOAP, XML-RPC or other protocols, JSON is gaining ground on the old favorite, XML. Last fall we said JSON is the developer’s choice and therefore it’s becoming the API provider’s choice, too. XML still wins overall, but more new APIs use JSON than XML. Of APIs we’ve seen in 2011, 20% only use JSON, meaning 1 in 5 are saying goodbye to XML.
We write a lot about the growth in the number of APIs on ProgrammableWeb. But how about usage? Some APIs see so many requests that they measure in billions. We refer to these companies as the API Billionaires Club. The image below, which comes from ProgrammableWeb Founder John Musser’s talk later today at Glue, shows the big names that make up this exclusive club.
APIs are giving more leverage to small independent players. Whether it’s a single developer, or a small web development team, each quality API that is produced gives them another leg up. There is a wonderful varied ecosystem emerging here with many highly specified niche players. TinyPay.me is one such player, offering e-commerce services with focus on simplicity and product placement. The TinyPay.me API gives developers a unique online storefront option.
ProgrammableWeb has seen tremendous growth, as we shot past 3,000 APIs in our directory. Our sponsors and partners enable us to have the top-notch writing and editing staff we do to maintain this growth. We’re pleased to offer you this chance to learn more about the companies that make our site possible.
The book publishing business is undergoing rapid changes. Self-publishing your own content is a growing trend and Lulu, an online publishing platform wants to provide publishers, content creators and developers with an API to manage the entire process. The Lulu APIs now cover publishing, document conversion and full e-commerce capabilities.
Asking the simple question to API maintainers of how scalable is your API seems to conjure some awkward pauses. The Easy API recently discovered how well equipped we were to handle a massive influx of requests to our system. Quickly it became evident that the system wasn’t able to handle over a million requests a month, and failed under heavy load. This article discusses programming, servers, and monitoring changes that helped bring The Easy API back online and into the next level. The techniques discussed played a critical role in helping The Easy API scale to over a million requests a month and growing rapidly.
BrainHoney offers a distributed eLearning platform. Teachers can create course content on the site and students can interact with the content, even submitting their assignments through the system. The company boasts that its product is used in all 50 US states and in 54 countries internationally. With this scale of adoption, offering the BrainHoney API seems to be the next step in further captivating their happy customers would be to allow them to build their own custom interfaces to the system.
If you are writing a telephony system using the Twilio API, Tropo API, or Cloudvox API, you can interface with YouCantCall.us to shield your system from phone spam. Now wouldn’t it be great if the YouCantCall.us API could be integrated into a “block” button that appeared on standard phones?
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