I spend a lot of time each week reading the blog feeds, and twitter streams from the best API providers in the space. In my opinion this represents the lowest hanging fruit in my API monitoring, where the stories just land in my lap, delivered to me by my feeds—then once I've picked all this fruit, I find myself looking through the Twitter followers of many of these APIs.
The Twitter followers can contain some really interesting gems from across the API sector that I wouldn't find through my normal channels. By manually browsing the Twitter followers for APIs I’m looking for:
- People - Interesting folks doing innovative stuff across the API space.
- Companies - New startups that have trouble cutting through the noise in space.
- Stories - The lesser known stories that I see when looking through my unique lens.
- Services - API related services that might be shifting from the norm, pushing the API space forward.
- Tools - Developers are notoriously bad at marketing their work, and I find some cool tools on Twitter.
I have tools that I have developed that help me filter, search and easily look through thousands of Twitters followers, but I also find manually looking through them allows me to find the gems that my algorithm can’t always find. A balance of programmatic and human approach to scanning the followers seems to work best.
Some of my best companies, individuals and stories I’ve written, have come from trolling through Twitter followers. While I focus on my core feeds to understand the space daily, each week I try to remember to expand my network, adding new users, and blogs to my network, and Twitter followers is a great place to do this.
