The APIs That I Depend On For My Business

I maintain an active list of online services I depend on for my business, in Evernote. Each month I spend an hour or two maintaining this list, to make sure it is complete and actively change my logins when appropriate. As a recovering IT guy, and maintaining infrastructure for myself, but also Audrey Watters--so I keep good tabs on the various services I use.

While going through this my services list this month, I added a new section to it, and started tracking if I depend on the service for their API. I have enough automated jobs running on top of APIs I needed to make sure I keep good track of which APIs I depend on. Here are some of the API I depend on to keep my business operational.

First I depend on a couple of key Google APIs:

	Gmail - Integrate my daily emails, as well as email blasts with my administrative system
	Google Contacts - Keep business and individual profiles in my admin system in sync with my daily Google Contacts activity.
	Google Calendar - Publish hackathon calendars to Google Calendar as well as keep conferences, meetups and other events I pull through APIs and curate in sync
	Google Docs - Publish copies of blog posts to Google Docs, as well as version of pages from my content management system to Google Docs
	Google Sites - All of my research is in Google Sites. So I tend to publish lists of curated news, blog posts and other research to wiki pages under specific projects

Next, I would say Amazon Web Services delivers some pretty critical APIs I can't live without:

	Amazon EC2 - I deploy and shutdown various EC2 instances for various jobs I run for API Evangelist. All APIs are managed on AWS EC2
	Amazon S3 - All heavy objects in my systems are stored at Amazon S3 including photos, PDFs, presentations and video
	Amazon Route 53 - I use AWS Route 53 to manage the underlying DNS for all my applications and sites across multiple domains

Then there are an assortment of other APIs I use throughout my web sites and applications:

	AlchemyAPI - I use alchemy for content, keyword and author extraction on articles and site pages that I curate as part my daily routine
	Crunchbase - I pull company profiles from Crunchbase and use in my research and profile for API Evangelist
	EventBrite - I pull hackathons, meetups and conferences from EventBrite and use in my admin system
	Evernote - I do all my note taking and recording of thoughts in Evernote, there are some folders I keep in sync with my admin system
	Flickr - I've historically published a lot of public images to Flickr for SEO purposes, so many of my blog posts or events that I record a lot of images and video from get stored at Flickr using the API in my admin system
	Foursquare - I use Foursquare as a journal and pull the timeline into my admin system and apply as framework to my writing and traveling
	Github - All my stories use Gists to display code and some of my larger productions have full repositories that I access via command line and via the API
	Paypal - I handle subscriptions and white paper purchases via Paypal
	Pinboard - All my curation runs through Pinboard. Anything I bookmark while reading feeds or on the open web gets bookmarked with Pinboard, then with the API I pull into my admin system
	ProgrammableWeb - I use ProgrammableWeb's API to pull new APIs into my curation system
	Stack Exchange - I use stack exchange to monitor API activity on the forums and keep track of discussion counts for various APIs.
	Tumblr - I assemble some curated posts and summaries and publish to Tumblr via the API
	Twitter - Twitter is central to my API monitoring, ranking and curation system. I depend on the REST and Streaming APIs

I depend on these APIs to run API Evangelist, API Voice and The API Stack as well as support the other research and consulting that I do. Some of these services I pay for, some of them I use for free. Usually if a service sticks around in my world for more than 3 or 4 months I pay for some sort of premium account or access.

I’m sure I depend on a lot of APIs, partly because this is my game, I’m an API Evangelist. But it is also because APIs provide me with the data and resources I need to operate, and as a programmer I’m able to quickly put APIs to use for my business.

Tracking on the APIs I depend will be a regular part of my IT strategy, and I’m even going to publish this as a public page on my websites--showcasing what APIs have done for my business.

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