When Facebook announced its timeline partners yesterday, there were many familiar names on the list. Some were especially familiar to us because, in addition to now adding their “actions” to Facebook, they also provide APIs to access data created by their users.
I saw a new acronym the other day, “SoLoMoClo,” which stands for Social, Local, Mobile, Cloud. The reason people are focused on these four categories are the multi-billion dollar ecosystems created by Facebook and Twitter in Social, Groupon in Local, iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) in Mobile, and Amazon and Salesforce in Cloud. I think we’ve only scraped the tip of the iceberg in these categories, and that a number of SoLoMoClo companies will break out in 2012.
The web API as we know it will turn 13 years old this year. Will we see more maturity, or are we still looking at a gangly teenager? We asked those same experts who identified 2011 API trends to look into their crystal balls. How will APIs change in 2012 and what future trends can you prepare for now?
As we look back at 2011, it was a big year for APIs. We passed both the 3,000 API and 4,000 API marks within six months. In our discussions with various companies, it seems like APIs are becoming a bigger part of their online and mobile strategies. We reached out to several industry experts to highlight what API stories were on their radar this year. From big companies launching developer programs to the undeniable technical preferences of developers, these were the trends in 2011.
The API landscape is an extremely well chronicled and championed space. Every product has its own API nearly, and developers still get excited about digging into the newest, greatest data on the market. It’s the developer equivalent of having to have the newest Apple gadget, right when it becomes available.
In our zeal to access more and more data though, we’ve forgotten what working with data is supposed to be all about.
At the recent Small Business Web Summit, several member-company representatives hashed out a list of guidelines that may one day become a “Good Housekeeping”-esque seal for The Small Business Web, a consortium of API providers that are working together to create better small business tools. Among the list is an entire section devoted to APIs, where the seal would signify a series of promises to partners.
As I continue to report on new APIs popping up all over the Internet, one theme has caught my attention: systems powered by simple information tasks completed by humans. It’s developing trend in which humans take requests from software systems, complete them, and feed the results back into the system. This is a fundamental shift in computing. Now, Human input is no longer solely for the purpose of controlling or directing the application. It has become just another functional component of the system. The human is taking the place of a software component and can in some instances be described in terms of expected inputs and outputs.
Our directory recently passed 4,000 APIs, each one different than almost every other one. There is a single defining factor of all 4,000: in some way, they’re available for any developer to use. They’re public. There is a virtual ocean below our directory of APIs that are currently private. These APIs drive mobile apps, connect strategic partnerships and exist within organizations large and small to facilitate data sharing.
Some of the APIs in our directory look like cousins of the private API. Their documentation is only available by request, or access is only offered to approved partners. And increasingly, there is a paid barrier to many we list. In some cases, the entire business is an API or collection of APIs.
JSON is popular, at least when it comes to API data formats. Of the new APIs we added to our directory, one in five supports only JSON. But how many support JSONP, which allows developers to load data directly on the client side no matter the originating server? There are 258 JSONP APIs out of a possible 1,724 JSON APIs. That’s only 15% that support an approach many developers will want to use.
The Tnooz THack event at ITA Google’s headquarters in Boston was a lesson in how overwhelming development for the travel industry can be. On the morning of the first day of the hackathon, the eleven API hosts provided brief descriptions of their APIs and their respective functionality or access to data. It became clear, very quickly, that most of the APIs were not like the Twitter API or Google Maps API. Many of the APIs delivered a lot of complex data in a highly structured format. Building some kind of mash-up using any of the APIs would be a challenge.
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