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Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
I’m slowly processing XML files of patents from the US Patent Office. You can read the origin of my journey here, but as of today, I finished processing 50 files of patent applications for 2013, ad...
I look at a lot of APIs, I work hard to brainstorm ideas for potential new APIs, and I can’t think of a more important API to not just the API economy, but to the overall economy, than an IRS API t...
I’m working on an API design for the free application for federal student aid form, also known as FAFSA, over the last couple weeks. I took the form which had over 150 separate fields, and turned i...
I spend a lot of time talking to folks on the phone, Skype, in Google Hangouts and in person about their API business models. Not everyone I talk with is willing to share their story public, so I’m...
The terms of service for APIs is the single most important building block of an API strategy, one that dictates how developers can access and put API resources to use and sets the tone for an entir...
The question of whether government should charge for APIs and other digital services came up again this week during a Google Hangout I did with Luke Fretwell(@lukefretwell) of @GovFresh. I began ex...
Over the last 3 years I have looked at all the APIs available in ProgrammableWeb API directory, with about 2500 of which I monitor regularly. Throughout this process I’ve evolved an eye for what bu...
I got back from Paris, France this Sunday, after Audrey (@audreywatters) and I spoke at API Days last Thursday. This was the second annual API event, which kicked off last year around the same time...
I was able to give my FAFSA API project a little more attention in preparation for some data jams later this week. While there is still a lot of work to happen, I feel pretty good about what I have...
I’m just getting time to read through the news coming out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the next phase of the Oracle v. Google case, which kicked off December 4...
I’m just getting time to read through the news coming out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the next phase of the Oracle v. Google case, which kicked off December 4...
We have added the OpenEd API to the API Commons. OpenEd provides open educational resources like courses, videos and games for teachers to use in their classes. Using the API, developers can read ...
I’m getting more PR folks reaching out to me trying to get me to review their client’s API program. I’m happy to add these to my list and make time each week to review them alongside the other new ...
I’m pretty excited about heading to Paris this week to speak at API Days. The is the 2nd edition of the original french edition of API Days, and they have organized over 60 talks across two days: D...
This fall while working in Washington D.C. I was introduced to the concept ofrepresenting government services with JSON-LD. Using the civic services schema.org proposal you can represent common gov...
My friend @harmophone, Director of Platform for the Klout API, wrote up a great piece before #APIStrat, called A Short Proposal for Robots.json. This is a topic that I’ve been meaning to make time...
My friend @harmophone, Director of Platform for the Klout API, wrote up a great piece before #APIStrat, called A Short Proposal for Robots.json. This is a topic that I’ve been meaning to make time...
On November 6th, 2013 the Associated Students, University of California(ASUC) Senate submitted SB 48: A Bill in Support of Student Information Systems Application Developers, stating that “open dat...
I’m working on an API for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. I’m working my way through a document from Department of Education called the 2013-2014 Application Processing Syste...
I was asked to help put some thought into an API for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid iniative. First, what is FAFSA: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the for...
I’ve been pushing the boundaries of open data and API deployment using Github. I have a project I’ve been evolving since August called Simple API and its sister implementation api.ongithub.com, whi...
I created 11 very simple API designs for the launch of API Commons. We needed some API definitions to show the potential of the commons, so I wanted to design a handful of common API patterns to se...
With the growing number of hypermedia API deployments, hypermedia haters© are going to lose a major argument, that hypermedia is just an academic exercise and will never work in the wild. ;-) The ...
I was going through the Free Law Project Court Opinion API today, playing with the API and data, while developing some server and client side tooling. All the API endpoints are pretty consistence b...
The Free Law Project has launched a U.S. court opinions API as part of the Court Listener project, which currently aggregates 2,204,339 court opinions, from 350 jurisdictions. The Court Listener O...
I’m tracking on the evolution of Executive Order 13642 from last May, which was the White House directive to make open and machine readable the new default for government information. The piece tha...
I’m tracking on the evolution of Executive Order 13642 from last May, which was the White House directive to make open and machine readable the new default for government information. The piece tha...
The folks over at Dyn who provide traffic, message, remote access and domain services, including a suite of SOAP and REST based APIs, have released some interesting stats on their API usage. Dyn h...
photo credit I’m totally thankful for the experiences I’ve had over the last 90 days in Washington D.C. as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and even more thankful I’m able to keep doing much of t...
Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you can’t get the buy in for APIs within a company or organization. There are many reasons why API efforts will fail within entrenched companies, organizations...
API Commons is about providing a simple and transparent mechanism for the copyright free sharing and collaborative design of API specifications, interfaces and data models. When learning about API ...
I’m doing a lot more API deployments from dead simple data sources since I started working in the federal government. As part of these efforts I’m working to put together a simple toolkit that newb...
I’m working on a variety of ways that anyone can easily deploy API on common cloud platforms. I’m working through a series of open and secure, modular API demos written in PHP, using the Slim frame...
I am a big fan of opening up data in city, county, state and federal government and across companies of all shapes and sizes. One thing I’ve learned in my 20+ years of working with data is that whe...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and a couple weeks ago I did a public Go...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and last week I did a private Google Sp...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and a couple weeks ago I did a MySQL to ...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and a couple weeks ago I did a JSON to A...
I have a long list of little projects I’m working on across government, and since I’m not being paid for some of this work now (except for the support of my amazing partners), the publicity and pag...
I have a long list of little projects I’m working across government, and since I’m not being paid for some of this work now (except for the support of my amazing partners), the publicity and page v...
I was asked to help put some thought into an API for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid iniative. First, what is FAFSA: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the for...
I am a programmer with a full understanding of how to deploy, consume and put APIs to use. Even with this knowledge and ability I’m continually blown away by the opportunities APIs afford, even wit...
I just found an interesting brainstorm going on via Github, about how to make government more efficient and interoperable using APIs, that was created by government consultant Leah Bannon (@leahban...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and next up is a private Google Spreadsh...
I’ve been working through several demos of how to go from common data sources like MySQL and Google Spreadsheet to API over the last couple of weeks. So far I have five basic working demos: MyS...
I was working with Google APIs over the last couple days while building Google Spreadsheet to API tools. It gave me a chance to look around the Google Developers Area and rediscover some of the pos...
Every API provider should provide code samples in a variety of languages, helping developers get up and running as fast as possible. Dwolla is taking this one step further and providing a fully fu...
SlashDB aka /db, has recently been added to the Amazon Marketplace, providing a complete database to API solution as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Companies can use the /db Amazon image to automa...
I’ve created a new playground for some of my work. Pretty much everything at API Evangelist runs on Github, and each new project I produce starts its life as a Github repository. To support this wo...
On the second anniversary of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), where we are celebrating a “global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance”, and that: OGP has ...
Steve Willmott(@njyx) from API infrastructure provider 3Scale and API Evangelist launched a new partner project yesterday at Defrag, that we are calling API Commons. The mission with API commons is...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and next up is a public Google Spreadshe...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and next up is JSON to API, using JSON s...
I’m doing a lot more API deployments from dead simple data sources since I started working in the federal government. As part of these efforts I’m working to put together a simple toolkit that newb...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and first up is MySQL to API. For this ...
I’m working on a series of simple scripts that help people deploy APIs from some of the most common data sources. I’m starting with a series of PHP scripts, and next up is JSON to API. For this PH...
I’m working to expand my awareness of APIs in our federal government by spending time each week discovering, reviewing and trying to brainstorm ways to expand and evolve existing government API eff...
During the recent federal government shutdown many sources of open data and APIs were suddenly rendered unavailable, including the flagship Data.gov. As government workers went home and lights were...
The primary mission of API Evangelist is to spread awareness of APIs amongst the masses, expanding the audience beyond just the IT crowd, and developer community. Initially I wanted to make sure bu...
On June 29th, 2006, Google launched Google Maps API allowing developers to put Google Maps on their own sites using JavaScript. The API launch was just shy of 6 months after the release of Google M...
Audrey and I went up to University of Mary Washington yesterday and participated in the #OpenVa discussion, where I gave a presentation on the importance of APIs and how they will play a significan...
I’m working through the schedule for API Strategy & Practice Conference (#APIStrat) in San Francisco, preparing for the 3Scale / API Evangelist produced event October 23rd through 25th. I’m pr...
I’m working through the schedule for API Strategy & Practice Conference (#APIStrat) in San Francisco, preparing for the 3Scale / API Evangelist produced event October 23rd through 25th. I’m pr...
I spend a lot of time finding valuable data sets and manually converting, processing and outputting into more usable formats, so that they can be used in APIs that drive mobile and web applications...
I spend a lot of time finding valuable data sets and manually converting, processing and outputting into more usable formats, so that they can be used in APIs that drive mobile and web applications...
In 2010 when I started API Evangelist I saw the technological potential of APIs, but while the rest of the online space was focused on what APis could do for developers, I was focused on what APIs ...
I spend the year going from city to city, attending conferences, meet-ups and hackathons–speakng, networking and doing the things that makes my world go around. Every November I find myself a littl...
I just got off the phone with a new Backend as a Service provider BizMobify, who is looking to deliver BaaS services to the enterprise. The timing for the call couldn’t be better, as I’m updating u...
The federal government shutdown today. At the Department of Veterans Affairs we are still working through next monday, so it was business as usual today for me. One of my projects is preparing a l...
I had the pleasure to connect with the talented Code for America fellow, Moncef Belyamani(@monfresh) this week and talk about a very meaningful API project, called the Ohana API. “The Ohana API is...
I’m working on taking inventory of data assets at the Department of Veterans Affairs. While eventually this will include private data assets, in the beginning we are focusing on data that can be ma...
I’m playing with different approaches to rapidly design, develop, deploy and manage APIs using Github. While about 90% of what I’m building runs on Github, there is still about 10% that runs on Ama...
I asked a question on Twitter last night: Any examples of government APIs that allow for write (POST, PUT, PATCH) capabilities? I’m looking for existing agencies who have implemented already. While...
When it comes to building applications within the federal government, there are numerous road-blocks to innovation. I’m currently assisting with the inventorying of open data assets at the Departme...
I’m slowly getting my blog world in order after the move from my own proprietary blogging platform to using Github + Jekyll hosted using Github Pages. I’ve been using HTML pages for blog posts at ...
Download as PDF The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue arm of the United States federal government, responsible for collecting taxes, the interpretation and enforcement of the Internal Revenu...
Download as PDF The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue arm of the United States federal government, responsible for collecting taxes, the interpretation and enforcement of the Internal Revenu...
I have a panel this week at Nordic APIs called Business Models in an Internet of Things, with Ellen Sundh (@ellensundh) of Coda Collective, David Henricson Briggs of Playback Energy, Bradford Steph...
I was impressed with some of the data journalism behind the recent NPR story, Playgrounds For Everyone, a community-edited guide to accessible playgrounds. The story is definitely an important one...
George Reese has a very interesting post from last week over at O’Reilly. It is about an earlier post he did on the unpublished Tesla REST API. I’ll let you read the post, “The Myth of the Private ...
In government there is a fear of exposing public data via APIs–rightfully so. This is not just a government concern, it exists in all industries within each an every business and organization. We a...
The more I immerse myself in government, I’m reminded of the central role that the spreadsheet plays in our business and government operations–primarily Microsoft Excel, but also in some circles, t...
Building off a similar topic this week, I was asked to dumb down or explain what I meant by “Loosely Coupled Services”, alongside a “Library of Modular Services”. In this case, loosely couple means...
I’m always looking for simpler and more concise language to describe API, while writing stories and white papers for my audience. I recently used the phrase “library of modular web services”, in a ...
I work with some seriously smart people on a day to day basis, virtually across the web, and in person on some of the projects I’m working on in federal government. Much like APIs, Github is fast b...
The Federal Trade Commission(FTC) just settled a case with web-enabled camera maker TRENDnet, signaling the government agency’s first action against an Internet of Thing’s company. The FTC’s compl...
I was working on series of API endpoints this week, each of them had a basic search parameter, allowing you pass a keyword to filter your API request. Pretty standard stuff. After deploying the AP...
There is a growing number of API conferences going on this year in the US, but the hunger for API knowledge isn’t just something going on in this country, we are seeing a demand for API information...
There is a growing number of API conferences going on this year in the US, but the hunger for API knowledge isn’t just something going on in this country, we are seeing a demand for API information...
When it comes to APIs, people respond to stories about real world examples, even more than solid technological implementations. If you can demonstrate how APIs are actually providing a solution, yo...
I have a whole list of projects around open data and APIs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Additionally I have numerous other open data and API projects I’d like to tackle across other f...
One important thing I’ve learned while running API Evangelist, is the importance of picking your head up from your work on a regular basis, and tuning into the world around me. When you are running...
While we officially launched API Strategy & Practice, San Francisco edition back in May, we’ve been pretty quiet during the summer months. Well, now summer is coming to a close, and we are now ...
While we officially launched API Strategy & Practice, San Francisco edition back in May, we’ve been pretty quiet during the summer months. Well, now summer is coming to a close, and we are now ...
I used to think that the API space is resistant to defining standards around REST, data formats, webhooks, hypermedia, api definitions and other key areas of the space, because after the top down, ...
When it comes to API discovery, as an industry we haven’t been able to find a satisfactory technological solution yet. While I often feel the right approach hasn’t emerged yet, I think we are just ...
I’ve been doing API Evangelist for three years now, a world where selling APIs to existing companies outside of Silicon Valley, and often venture capital firms is a serious challenge. While APis ha...
I thoroughly enjoy the assortment of emails, LinkedIn messages and phone calls I get from people in the SMB and enterprise, letting me know the role my blog plays in them starting, cultivating and ...
Github is really doing some cool stuff to help open data folks manage and share their data. They just launched the ability to render data from .csv (comma-separated) and .tsv (tab-separated) files...
I’ve had the joy of watching a lot of you bash on my girlfriend, from the misogynistic douche bags telling her to get back in the kitchen because she questions their technology startup, to the rece...
I wrote a piece about providing a full download vs. API last month, where I used the Census Bureau API as an example. The post got the attention of the folks at the Census, and they invited me out ...
Time Tracking API platform Harvest has embraced Github as part of their API ecosystem. I’m always on the hunt for examples of API providers using Github, so I figured I’d showcase Harvest’s creativ...
As I immerse myself in the federal government, I have left my private sector world where web APIs have become commonplace. Sure I still worked hard to get outside of Silicon Valley and reach out fu...
As I spend time in Washington DC, I get a lot of questions regarding API design, deployment and management. It is quite likely my writing will evolve here at API Evangelist during the next year. Yo...
This is from a question I answered on the API Craft Forum tonight titled: SOA vs API? I happened to look at the slide and also related video but unfortunately still do not have a crystal clear vi...
There are just a handful of API platforms that I feel have greatly impacted the world of APIs and were significant in leading the space in important ways. These platforms include, but are not limit...
Securely accessing API with oAuth can be one of the bigger pains in the ass for developers. Poor understanding of how oAuth works and often lack of good client libraries, can make API authenticatio...
Securely accessing API with oAuth can be one of the bigger pains in the ass for developers. Poor understanding of how oAuth works and often lack of good client libraries, can make API authenticatio...
In this computer driven business world its easy to end up with a mess of documents across a company’s network. No matter how much you try to organize, name and add metadata to documents, providing ...
Tomorrow, will be my first official day in Washington D.C. as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. I’m super excited, yet also very calm about what is happening. It seems like it is so meant to be, th...
Overview of API Integration Integrating with a single API can be tough, let alone multiple APIs. I see integration being about on-boarding, exploration, education, authentication, code samples, te...
The word “open” gets thrown around a lot in the API space. So much in fact, the term has lost just about any meaning. We don’t say “open API” anymore, we identify an API as public, partner or priva...
Sentiment analysis and social media analytics API provider Repustate is providing a virtualized, portable, on-premise version of its API--adding a new twist to the concept of API deployment. Using...
During my monitoring of the API space this week, I came across an interesting blog post from data platform Splunk, showcasing the tools they provide for developers who are putting their real-time d...
Some of the smart people in Washington D.C. have decided to roll their own API management solution, providing their own open source solution to many of the common problems faced by API providers li...
I get a lot of questions from folks about the why, when and how of securing an API. And in keeping in sync with my audience, I wanted to provide a plain english story of securing your API, avoiding...
I’ve been an advocate for non-developers being one of the most important audiences for your API, since I started API Evangelist. I know us developers love to believe we are the primary force behind...
This is my first blog post, following a very nice week, offline in Maine. I have purposely setup the API Evangelist network to be a mesh network of API research project nodes, allowing anyone to to...
Since 2010 I have had a page on this site dedicated to “API Management”. In 2013 the API universe expanded, and I’ve broken my work in this area into three separate, open source API research projec...
I am always working to define myself, in both the physical world and the virtual one that has become an increasing part of my identity. As part of this work, I’m spending some time trying to unders...
I’m going through all of my bulding blocks and tools for API management, as I’m updating and expanding this area of the API Evangelist network. After doing this work, I’m surprised that are aren’t ...
I turned 41 in June. As I retool, reboot and readjust during what I guess could be called “vacation”, I’m reflecting on the last year and the major shift that has gone on in my world. First off, t...
I received an email from Flickr today about a planned API outage later this month. I’m an afficinado of the interesting ways API providers communicate around maintenance and outages within their ec...
I have a long, winding history of database administration in my past. I’ve been managing databases since my first job working on school district databases in the State of Oregon in 1988. So I’ve be...
I’ve had so many discussions on this topic, I felt like I had written a post on it, but when the topic came up again today, I realized I hadn’t. This is a regular conversation I get into with open ...
I’m rapidly expanding the areas I track on in the world of APIs, trying to understand the myriad ways APIs are influencing interoperability between companies and platforms, being applied alongside ...
As an evangelist, your responsibility is to get the word out about an API, and provide users with the resources they will need to be successful. While executing on your evangelism strategy, there ...
Our federal government is working on the next iteration of Data.gov, and just published a first look at what is being called Next.Data.Gov. This next version is meant to build off the momentum of t...
When I first started API Evangelist, I quickly saw that there was more to this whole API game, beyond just the technology. Simple, logical, technological solutions like REST and JSON are essential,...
I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts around emerging trends in using virtualized app containers, that are providing a much more modular approach to deploying and managing application backends. ...
I was working my way through all the Dropbox news that came out of the DBX Conference over the weekend. There was some pretty savvy moves by the cloud storage provider, continuing its evolution tow...
I’m always looking for dead simple examples of what an API is to help average folk understand what APIs are, and how they can be applied in their worlds. My current research on backend as a servic...
The primary reason I’m switching all of my 35+ research projects in the API space to my new Hacker Storytelling format, is to make everything I do open and machine readable by default. Every proje...
Building Blocks At API Evangelist I define things in terms of building blocks, meant to establish, easy to understand modules you can pick and choose from as part of any strategy, including API ma...
After looking back at 2012, I wanted a January 1, 2013 blog post for my blogs. My first blog post of 2012 was my tour schedule for January, 2012. While it was a pretty busy time for evangelizing an...
I just spent 30 minutes on the phone with an important group in the European Union called OPENi, which is aiming to be an open-source, web-based, framework for integrating applications with cloud-b...
The world of API management is expanding, and to support this growth I’ve broke up my research into three separate buckets: API design, API deployment and API management. Zooming in on API deploym...
Simple, embeddable tools can be one of the most powerful tool in an API evangelists toolbox. While there was a wide variety of forces that were at play in the social API evolution, contributing to ...
APIs are providing much needed access and visibility into the backend technology that is increasingly driving our desktops, laptops, mobile phones and beginning its migration into our homes, cars a...
I have written about the well publicized failure of the Netflix public API before, and how in the API space things are often not what they seem. By my measurement Netflix is a massive API success s...
I’ve been slowly evolving API Evangelist from a single site, into an interconnected network of individual API projects. API Evangelist started as a research project back in July 2010, making its sh...
I’ve been slowly evolving API Evangelist from a single site, into an interconnected network of individual API projects. API Evangelist started as a research project back in July 2010, making its sh...
I’ve been organizing much of my research around APIs into groupings that I call “stacks”. The term allows me to loosely bundle common API resources into meaningful “stacks” for my readers to learn ...
As the API universe expands, I’m trying my best to stay in tune with where its going and try to help people understand the space, whether you are a newbie or API veteran–I want you to find what you...
One trend in API usage I’m closely watching is the aggregation of APIs by a new wave of startups. As the world adopts more cloud services, the need to aggregate content across multiple APIs is grow...
While I was at API Days this weekend in San Francisco, I managed to catch a handful of talks Saturday afternoon after I landed at OAK. While listening to each talk, I kept hearing one technical API...
I had several important things happen over the last week. One of them was sharing the stage for the first time with my partner in crime, Audrey Watters (@audreywatters). Although I spent most of t...
I had several important things happen over the last week. One of them was sharing the stage for the first time with my partner in crime, Audrey Watters (@audreywatters). Although I spent most of t...
The news is finally out. I will be heading to Washington DC to spend a year as a White House Innovation Fellow. APIs, open data and our government has been a passion of mine for my whole career, so...
I went to API Days SF yesterday. Unfortunately, due to an unexpected obligation on the other coast I was unable to make it in time for the Friday kick-off. But after my plane landed at OAK yesterda...
APIs are quickly moving into the mainstream. In 2012, companies, organizations and government agencies all took notice of the need for deploying and consuming APIs. In 2013 there is still a lot of ...
I went to Spain at the beginning of the month to speak at API Days. While there I had the pleasure of connecting with the team from Apicultur. If you are not familiar with Apicultur, they are a pla...
Understanding our history is critical to understanding where we are going. I have been studying the history of web APIs for the last three years. Even though I have been through the API strategies...
I’m doing a keynote this weekend with the infamous, edtech rabble-rouser Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) at InstructureCon in Park City Utah, this Wednesday June 19th. Audrey and I will be talking...
Coming on the heels of API Days Mediterranea in Madrid Spain, is the next event in the series, API Days San Francisco. We kicked off the API Days event series in Paris, at the end of last year, and...
In 2007, Twilio launched as a groundbreaking API-as-a-product platform, introducing a voice API that enabled developers to make and receive phone calls through any cloud application. Over the next ...
Download as PDF In the early days, APIs were just about deployment and consumption–you were doing one or the other. Then from 2006 to 2012 API management was introduced from providers like Masher...
In November 2006, API the first API service provider Mashery came out of “stealth mode” to offer documentation support, community management and access control for companies wishing to offer public...
Enterprise content sharing platform box launched a new developer revenue sharing program for its API developer ecosystem, called $rev. Box $rev is pretty straightforward. You just integrate the Bo...
In the last two years I’ve seen the emergence of cloud platforms that focus on helping data administrators, owners and stewards, generate APIs from their data sources. The new cloud services like...
Del.icio.us was a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003. Del.icio.us implemented a simple tagging system that al...
There are plenty of tools and services you can use to manage your API and its developer community. But there is no platform that provides as much benefit and versatility as Github. Github is a soc...
I got an email from IFTTT last night, simply stating: As of today, IFTTT has stopped supporting the Posterous Channel. The Channel has been removed, along with any Recipes that made use of Poster...
After just a couple months of REST and relaxation, the build up to API Strategy & Practice SF is kicking into gear. We officially launched the new site for San Francisco last week, featuring th...
I just got back from Madrid, Spain, where I spoke at APIdays Mediterranea. I really enjoy the API Days format, because the events are small, intimate API learning and networking opportunities. Whi...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently filed a a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, urging the court to block copyright claims in the Oracle v. Google legal batt...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently filed a a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, urging the court to block copyright claims in the Oracle v. Google legal batt...
Have you checked out what the Webshell.io team is up to lately? I know I haven’t been in there for a couple months, and it looks like they’ve been heads down making some interesting improvements. ...
I’ve been tracking on what I call API aggregation for some time now. I started seeing the API aggregation trends in 2010, then I saw this pick up in 2011 with the emergence of providers like Singly...
Expansion is in the air. Quarterly reports are in, we are moving into summer and companies like Twilio, Evernote, Salesforce and Foursquare are expanding and growing at healthy, steady paces. Mobi...
Over the last year I’ve worked hard to standardize and automate as much of my monitoring of the API space as I can. The amount of information I was monitoring daily was getting overwhelming–I neede...
I’m adding some new BaaS features I found in a recent press release from BaaS provider AnyPresence titled, “AnyPresence Launches 4th-Generation Mobile Backend-as-a-Service Platform with Unparallele...
I’m working my way through all the API management providers, making sure I’m up to speed on what service each provider is offering these days. As part of this work I’ve been playing with the Apipha...
I have been using Github to manage my code for a couple years now, but in the last year I’m using Github more often for a variety of projects that don’t always have code involved–examples ranging f...
I wanted to share a quick visualization of the beneifts of Barack Obama’s Presidential directive that every Federal Government agency should have an API, following Executive Order 13571, and part o...
I’m reading IRS: Turn Over a New Leaf, Open Up Data, from the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. I’ll let you read it in its entirety, but these are the points that are sticking with me: One of Mr...
Salesforce is doing some pretty interesting stuff with the sandbox environment for DeveloperForce. Using the DeveloperForce sandbox you can create copies of your data, allowing you to develop, tes...
I just had a demo of some of the new features in the WSO2 API Manager. Since WSO2 is one of my partners, I have a regular call with them to discuss the space and I often get demos of their new prod...
Cloud storage of documents is becoming commonplace. Individuals, companies, government and non-government organizations have increasingly seen the potential of storing files in the cloud using serv...
I’m increasingly finding a company’s approach to using Github, a vital signal of the health of a company, their team, and the products and services they are delivering. An example of this is with ...
I’m increasingly finding a company’s approach to using Github, a vital signal of the health of a company, their team, and the products and services they are delivering. An example of this is with ...
I’m working through the wave of API innovation coming out of our Federal Government recently. During normal days at API Evangelist, I’m pulling private sector API usage examples and crafting them i...
I was looking through Steve Willmott’s slide deck from his talk at GlueCon this week, called The API- & App-ification of the Web. He talks about the evolution towards Single Page Web Applicati...
I just got back from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I visited Dallas last night to help kick off the first gathering of the DFW API Professionals Meetup. We got together at Microsoft around 6PM and I...
I encounter many enterprise folks who dismiss APIs as nothing more that just one of the technical building blocks of SOA. Folks who, no matter how much I explain, will never see APIs beyond a techn...
I’ve been tracking on a trend in the API space that I call API aggregation. Companies like Singly and Adigami are aggregating APIs into more meaningful API stacks, than any single API provider can ...
After looking through the list of folks who have RSVP’d for the DFW API Professionals Meetup in Dallas tomorrow night, it looks like an interesting mix of tech and business folk. The tech group is ...
As I’m monitoring the API space I’m trying to create meaningful grouping for companies to belong when tracking API trends. My groupings are sometimes in alignment with what we hear in the tech blog...
Curently I’m immersed in discovering, vetting and tracking on signals that show me which companies are trending in the API space. I’m looking for signals that will tell me which companies are makin...
Does anyone else notice the evolution of the Twitter developer area? The site has taken a page from the LinkedIn playbook and become more about embeddable buttons, badges and widgets than about API...
Space”) I’ve been working on expanding the amount of research and writing I can do via API Evangelist lately. In the last couple weeks I rolled out new projects in three areas: API Toolkits, API T...
Accounting API platform Xero has been taking a deeper look into the languages that their developers are using when integrating with the Xero API. Currently there are 1,600 active applications commu...
In the API space, we have to be constantly measuring and looking for signals that will help us understand where we should be focusing our resources, as part of an overall strategy. One of the ways ...
When it comes to the Internet of Things, APIs have a bright future. I tend to focus on the greater good when showcasing APIs, but occasionally I get tripped up by the market potential of APIs. I ca...
BaaS stacks have the potential to be the operating of the next generation of computing. BaaS has a lot of the characteristics of what we have historically defined as an OS, but tailored for apps th...
BaaS is an evolution. Its not a revolution, gamer changer or ground breaking new technology. It is a logical response to the demand for mobile applications and how to logically bring together ind...
As BaaS evolves, we are seeing the huge investment from numerous start-ups, as well as grabbing the attention of a handful of larger tech companies, but we are also seeing the first signs of major ...
The definition of what is a BaaS provider has not just an evolving meaning, but also means different things to different people. API Evangelist is looking to help define the space, and formulate a ...
While there are clearly leaders in the BaaS movement, there are 37 other companies working to make their mark on the space and serve the mobile app developer community. Each of these providers have...
Unless you are a BaaS provider or a mobile application developer, the linkage between BaaS and APIs may not be immediately clear. But once you study the space, you quickly notice that APIs are the ...
API calls and passing on cloud storage costs are the most common ways to approach BaaS pricing. But beyond these two areas, there are numerous other ways BaaS providers are pricing BaaS services f...
API Evangelist doesn’t focus on market or investment opportunities. I keep an eye out for product and innovation opportunities, which are a much different beast. These represent places where there ...
After reviewing the top BaaS providers like Appcelerator, Appery.io Kinvey, Parse and StackMob, a pattern of building blocks begin to emerge. Building blocks that BaaS providers are using to assemb...
The approaches to BaaS pricing are still evolving. Most of the providers have gone with an API call or storage cost approach to pricing, but there still is much debate about just which pricing mod...
The mobile app development space has grown into such an opportunity, it has begun to attract the attention of some of the heaviest hitters in the API space, Amazon Web Services, SalesForce and Rack...
Prepared By Kin Lane May 2013 Table of Contents Backend as a Service What is BaaS? How Does BaaS Differ From IaaS and PaaS? What Are The Benefits of BaaS? What ...
I sent three emails this morning to people, explaining what it is that I do and how they can get involved. This process reminded me that I need to do the same here via the blog on a regular basis, ...
I am tracking on 2000 APIs that I have deemed worthy enough to pay attention, out of the 9000 on ProgrammableWeb, 13,000 in APIHub and numerous APIs in Mashape’s marketplace. In addition to these A...
Hey everyone. I’m heading out to the Dallas-Fort Worth area the week after next, Tuesday, May 14, to kick off the DFW API Professionals Meetup. TheRightAPI team were so kind to invite me out to sp...
I had a question from an API owner land in my inbox. It is regarding the amount of attention and resources that should be spent on on-boarding new customers. Directly from the email: How would ...
I don’t personally use Parse or any other backend as a service (BaaS) provider to build mobile applications. I’m just playing role as analyst when it comes to the backend as a service space, but I ...
Listening to an episode of Traffic and Weather yesterday, renewed a concept that John Sheehan(@johnsheehan), founder of Runscope made in an article he wrote for NextWeb back in March. In the post, ...
Have you taken a moment and looked at the APIs AT&T is offering through their developer program lately? I think it is an interesting spread of API resources for a leading telco to offer, and is...
Have you taken a moment and looked at the APIs AT&T is offering through their developer program lately? I think it is an interesting spread of API resources for a leading telco to offer, and is...
I study the API space. I want to understand how we got where we are at, and try to understand where we are going with our usage of APIs. To do this I monitor the best of the existing and new APis...
I spend a lot of time on API Evangelist getting excited about APIs. Going on three years doing this, I’m getting a little more hardened in my view on what is “good” in the API space. Along with tha...
I’m always looking for easy, dead simple approaches to explaining APIs to people. Having real world examples, that folks can relate with, go along way in helping people wrap their heads around the ...
As the universe of APIs expands, I’m working to find new ways that I can discover, educate myself, then organize information around the most meaningful areas in the API space. As part of this effor...
It is has been a while since I updated any of my research around APIs & the Federal Government. In May 2012, I started monitoring the progress of the White House Digital Strategy, where I setup...
It is has been a while since I updated any of my research around APIs & the Federal Government. In May 2012, I started monitoring the progress of the White House Digital Strategy, where I setup...
There was a lot of buzz in the API space over the last two weeks. I’m not a big on being first with news from the world of APIs, I leave this approach to the tech blogs like Techcrunch, RWW, GigaOm...
There was a lot of buzz in the API space over the last two weeks. I’m not a big on being first with news from the world of APIs, I leave this approach to the tech blogs like Techcrunch, RWW, GigaOm...
Intel is reportedly buying API service provider Mashery for “a range of $120 million to $180 million”, according to ReadWrite(Web). As I reflect on this, two main questions come to mind: Was it...
On a regular basis I review my API consumption to evaluate how I’m using various APIs, and what I’m paying for them. I depend on around 20 APIs to make API Evangelist work, and I need to make sure ...
I’m a walking conflict most of the time. You should try being me, it can be tense about 40% of the time. I’ll give you a couple of example of what I mean to help bring you a little closer to what I...
Obligatory spider web photo, because Jim and Audrey did too! The ability for me to own kinlane.com, point it at a server, host a website and a blog has been an critical part of my online world and...
I wrote yesterday’s piece on API education with Codecademy back in February. I didn’t publish because I wanted to do more research on suggested areas of improvement for the Codecademy team to balan...
Last week Twitter expanded its Twitter Cards initiative to allow 3rd party app developers to include links to download apps within Tweets, opening up new opportunities for app discovery via Twitter...
How To Get Your Grandma, Mother, Daughter and Sister to Understand APIs? You stop using gendered approaches when explaining what an API is. I’m not going to cite any of the past or recent examples ...
As I do with many of my stories, I’ve been stewing on the news that online education platform Codecademy started offering API programming lessons for popular APIs like Twilio and NPR back in Januar...
The first #APIStrat video is here! For those of you who couldn’t make it to the APIStrat in New York last February, or in case you missed some of the sessions, the videos are finally starting to c...
I get a lot of inquiries from API owners about how they should price their API access in a way that will make sense to developers, but also help them generate revenue from their valuable API resour...
I’ve been programming professionally since 1988, so I’ve been around quite a few developers in my career. There seems to be a lot of moments lately that cause me to look back at this career, reasse...
I read your Terms of Service is one of the biggest lies on the Internet. We agree to terms of service for each and every service we use online, without ever reading and understanding exactly what w...
The Noun Project is soliciting feedback on their upcoming API. If you aren’t familar with The Noun Project, it is a innovative visual language project, that is creating a library of icons that will...
I depend on If This Then That (IFTTT) to move data around the cloud. I syndicate blog posts from API Evangelist to Blogger and Tumblr. This isn’t just blind syndication, it is SEO and also plan B...
A roadmap is an essential part of a healthy API ecosystem. The transparency and communication that come with providing a roadmap for your API and open data initiative will go a long way in building...
I spent some time drinking IPAs and talking education technology with Audrey (@audreywatters) and a friend of ours Adam Wendt (@skinnyblimp), the COO of Iris Educational Media last week. IRIS Educa...
NASA has a pretty cool challenge going on, to create an API for SkyMorph, a database of optical images and catalogs generated by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program. According to the NA...
It is becoming more common for API providers to deliver documentation using what’s known as interactive API documentation, instead of the usual static API documentation. Understanding how to use an...
Way to go brogrammers. You made sure a bright light in evangelism was partially dimmed tday. Really? With all the shaming that goes on targeted at women, you don’t have balls to take a little sha...
I’m tracking on a new wave of application frameworks and API centric architecture patterns, that are not just helping deliver the next wave of web & mobile apps, but also bridging, aggregating ...
It was inevitable. API Evangelist now has its own API. I had a couple partners ask for more sophisticated access than provided by RSS or JSON dumps out of my platform. So I launched a handful of A...
I had a demo of a new data extraction service today called Import.io. The service allows you to harvest or scrape data from websites and then output in machine readable formats like JSON. This is v...
I had a demo of a new data extraction service today called Import.io. The service allows you to harvest or scrape data from websites and then output in machine readable formats like JSON. This is v...
I wrote about the web to API service Import.io earlier today, and before I close the Evernote for this story, I wanted to highlight something else I thought they did interesting, on their pricing p...
Last week Mozilla launched their new Open Badges platform, as an open standard to recognize and verify learning. I immediately started thinking about how it could be applied to APIs for incentivizi...
Google launched a Realtime API for the Google Drive Platform today. It is the API version of the same functionality available on Google Drive, that allows for you and other collaborators to type, e...
Audrey (@audreywatters) forwarded a very interesting series of tweets to me yesterday from software artist, writer, and educator Jer Thorp (@blprnt): Has anyone written about APIs as art object...
I would say the most common path to an API is from your company’s database. This makes database to API connectors, tools and services a pretty valuable area of the API space. While there will alway...
This post is more rant, and about me working through my thoughts on this subject, which is why its on kinlane.com and not apievangelist.com or apivoice.com. This post is an aggregation of ongoing ...
I have a idea for a new API platform. Since I do not have any startup aspirations, I prefer setting my ideas free, for anyone to use, instead of acting on them myself. This idea is an evolution fr...
Audrey came to me last night and said she had a project that she wanted to tackle, using the CrunchBase API. She wanted to pull a list of education startups that were founded in 2010-2012, showing ...
Next generation payment provider Braintree just launched a new JavaScript library that helps merchants reduce their PCI scope in a flexible and testable way, which they are calling appropriately Br...
This story comes from Phil Leggetter (@leggetter) over at Pusher. Its about a client of theirs, cisimple, which provides continuous delivery services for mobile developers. cisimple just released a...
Maciej Ceglowskiis, the founder of popular social bookmarking platform Pinboard,made an interesting proposal over on the Pinboard Google Group: I’ve been thinking about imposing an API tax, the pr...
In May 2011 I released a book called the Business of APIs. The book was intended to be an introductory walkthrough for non-technical people, to the world of APIs. I wanted to educate business, orga...
I ended up at the Punfork API today for some reason. Full disclosure: “Punchfork has been acquired by Pinterest! Read the announcement. Site shutdown: March 31st, 2013”. Just getting that out of th...
I see a lot of new API platforms emerge, and often times you see them deploying their own solutions to problems that are actively solved by top API platforms, and are already adopted by common mobi...
Node.js, the server-side software system designed for writing scalable Internet applications in JavaScript, seems to be getting more attention lately from top API providers because of its event-dri...
Node.js, the server-side software system designed for writing scalable Internet applications in JavaScript, seems to be getting more attention lately from top API providers because of its event-dri...
One of the best aspects of being the API Evangelist, is I get to hang out with smart folks, doing gaming changing things across all business sectors. Last week I was able to make it to the API Soci...
It looks like the HTML5 document embedding platform Crocodoc is starting to plan the next version of their API. The are being very transparent about the process (which I like), and putting out the ...
Netflix has entered the final stages of shuttering its public API last week. Its been coming for a while now, starting in June of 2012, and now is official with the platform no longer accepting new...
When it came to API focused events, the only conference there was to attend was the Business of APIs Conference, from Mashery. They have been putting on the conference(correct me if I’m wrong) sinc...
I added the slide decks for the keynotes and sessions we have so far from API Strategy & Practice to the conference session page. As soon as we get videos, I will be linking them on the session...
As the API movement marches forward, it continues to grind against the enterprise and its legacy of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which increases the frequency at which people ask me, What i...
As the API Evangelist, I’ve made it my mission to go outside of the Silicon Valley bubble and educate the “normals” about the potential of APIs. In doing this I have conversations with a wide range...
Are you ready for more discussions about APIs? I know I am. :) This time its from our Scandinavian friends, with four events in 2013. Nordic APIs is a series of conferences and events held across S...
Are you ready for more discussions about APIs? I know I am. :) This time its from our Scandinavian friends, with four events in 2013. Nordic APIs is a series of conferences and events held across S...
I’m working through lists of APIs and API service providers who I’ve rated pretty highly because of their work in the past, but red flags have gone up because I’ve haven’t seen a blog post, tweet o...
It was interesting to see Amazon step up in the advertising game with the beta release of the Amazon Mobile Ads API this week. I wouldn’t want Amazon getting into my space, when it comes to any API...
I’m a little behind in working through my list of new APIs to review. So I’m spending about 3 hours each day going through my list of new APIs accumulated from ProgrammableWeb, Tweets, Bookmarks, G...
I’m looking at new and innovative ways companies are building analytics and visualizations on top of APIs, and one of the new tools I’ve come across is ImpactStory. ImpactStory aggregates altmetric...
I’ve been following the great coverage by Paul MIller over at Cloud Ave about whether Infochimps running from the Data Market business, and Discussing Data Markets in New York City. He’s touched on...
API driven analytics and visualizations is one of the new areas of API usage I’m tracking on. There are many “big data” platforms emerging these days, but I’m looking for dead simple tools and serv...
Hands on, interactive tools are proving to be the most useful way to learn about an API–empowering users to see it in action, and witness the value it delivers. Many companies are doing this by pro...
How to structure pricing for an API is one of the top 5 questions I get from people who are currently planning their API strategy. In my opinion, there is, and never will be a one size fits all API...
I stumbled across the Twitter Counter API in my monitoring for the API Stack this morning. The Twitter Counter API allows you to retrieve key metrics on any Twitter account like username, url and a...
During API Strategy & Practice in New York City, there was an awesome gathering of developer evangelists at the Tumblr offices, for the NYC Evangelist Meetup. I got the chance to hang out with...
I’ve had a lot of questions lately about how I make money, and how companies can either support what I do, and / or take advantage of services I offer. So I wanted to take some time to outline the ...
I feel we have done a good job explaining what is an API, why people need APIs, and providing services to manage APIs, but we are falling short on delivering information, tools and services for dep...
Heroku was down for a little while today. I saw the status report and for some reason actually clicked through to the web page. I don’t actually use Heroku, so it doesn’t impact me directly, but I’...
There are numerous companies, with existing IT infrastructure, who are looking to deploy APIs in 2013. These companies will be deploying APIs using their existing technology teams, or depending on ...
Photo Credit: AVnet I try to keep API Evangelist a place where API newbies and API experts can both find what they are looking for. To meet this demand I’m constantly moving the site around, tryin...
APIs are all the rage, anyone should be able launch an API from CSV, Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheet or the common databases such as MySQL, PostGres, Amazon RDS, Microsoft SQL Server. Right? I...
I spent time this week looking at 20, of what I’m calling API reciprocity providers, who are providing a new generation of what is historically known as ETL in the enterprise, to connect, transfer,...
Making onboarding with an API as frictionless as possible is one thing I like to study and educate my readers about. While I was studying what I call the API reciprocity space currently, which is a...
There is a great post by Lorinda Brandon (@lindybrandon) of SmartBear on ProgrammableWeb today called Governance vs Innovation: Do They Have to be Enemies?. She continues a conversation, from API ...
While I’m wading through dictionaries and thesauruses in an effort to find a more appropriate term “governance”, when looking at SOA governance through the API lense--I figured I’d flush out anothe...
After reading about Google’s release of their transparency report last month, I decided I would be addding API transparency reports to my list of essential building blocks for API owners. Since I w...
We closed up the API Strategy & Practice Conference (#APIstrat) last friday with a panel called APIs, Platforms and Ecosystem, where I moderated a healthy discussion with Tyler Stalder (@tylers...
I’m a firm believer in the power of the freemium model when it comes to APIs. Nothing is as it seems when you are deploying managing or consuming APIs. You have to have room to innovate and iterate...
Backend as a Service (BaaS) provider QuickBlox announced new pricing plans, which includes a free tier up to 10GB in traffic and storage, with unlimited API calls and push notifications. The BaaS ...
I’m currently tracking on 31 backend as a service providers, in an effort to better understand how this new breed of platforms are helping developers build web and mobile apps. After looking at all...
One of the lively discussions at the API Strategy & Practice conference in NYC last week was the backend as a service (BaaS) panel I moderated towards the end of the first day. We brought toge...
I see a lot of dead simple, yet meaningful uses of APIs come across my desk (I don’t have a desk, why do I keep saying this?) each day. One I saw today is something every school, whether K-12, coll...
Its the Monday morning after the API Strategy & Practice Conference. The conference went off without a hitch, and was exactly the conference I envisioned when 3Scale first contacted me seven mo...
Its the Monday morning after the API Strategy & Practice Conference. The conference went off without a hitch, and was exactly the conference I envisioned when 3Scale first contacted me seven mo...
The payment API provider Stripe released a jQuery payment tool, a general purpose library for building credit card forms, validating input, and formatting numbers. The library was developed to supp...
Salesforce has a pretty cool Code Share area within the DeveloperForce ecosystem, which allows developers to share code snippets with the rest of the community. Its a pretty cool way for anyone to...
Google is using the online learning platform Udacity to teach developers about game development. The new HTML Game Development course (CS255), is the online classroom for the programming class, cou...
I was checking out the updates to the AWS Reference Architecture, where they provide blueprints for how you can use AWS. In this version AWS provides an e-commerce architecture reference–providing ...
The API Strategy & Practice Conference is happening next week in NYC. I have had so much fun pulling together the schedule of keynotes, panels, sessions and the talks on the 429 - Too Many Req...
The API Strategy & Practice Conference is happening next week in NYC. I have had so much fun pulling together the schedule of keynotes, panels, sessions and the talks on the 429 - Too Many Requ...
Palo Alto has opened up city data, including operational data about the Palo Alto City Library. Using the Palo Alto City open data portal you can access machine-readable data sets about various asp...
The Backend as a Service (BaaS) space is picking up momentum in 2013. I’m tracking on 20 BaaS providers, in hopes of better understanding what is being offered in this space. Today I came across an...
Facebook launched a new video channel last week, dedicated to keeping developers up to date on the latest news, tutorials, speaking sessions from the Facebook developer ecosystem. Facebook is goin...
I’m spending a lot of time lately thinking about emerging trends in API usage. One area I’m tracking on, is around companies that are offering simple services that provide interoperability and auto...
I’ve been processing a conversation over at Branch, that was triggered by a story in TechCrunch by Sarah Perez(@sarahintampa) called, “StackMob Ratchets Up The Competition: Makes API Calls Free, La...
The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program, launched last year, bringing in talented individuals from the private sector, to Washington DC for 6-12 month “tours of duty” in the Federal Gover...
There is an interesting post on the Parse blog about instaDM, which is a service built using Parse, the BaaS platform, that provides private messaging in the Instagram ecosystem. This is a very in...
Salesforce talked a little bit about its strategy around the development and release strategy around the Salesforce Eclipse plug-in. Providing a little transparency into how they stagger its API r...
Google is adjusting their pricing model for the Adwords API, acknowledging that having a free usage tier is important. Making the API easier to access, while also ensuring a certain QOS. Google h...
I did a presentation at the DC API Meetup, when I was in Washington DC last week. My talk was some of my usual material around the history, business and politics of APIs, but included a section on ...
For the longest time I would get asked, “Which API service provider should I use to deploy my APIs?”. This was a tough question, because historically the API management providers don’t help you dep...
I was listening to Did You Hear That? I Think It Was The Sound Of A Walrus, on NPR this morning. It is about the Macaulay Library, which is: …the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive o...
I’ve spent a lot of time lately looking for new tools that will help you plan, develop, deploy and manage APIs. My goal is to keep refining the API Evangelist Tool section to provide complete API ...
When I talk about API discovery, in-person at events, or on my blog(s), I notice people automatically default to thinking I mean a universal API discovery language that will work for all web APIs. ...
I’m always working to find a way to organize my world, to help me better keep track of my wealth of content and information, while also assisting people in navigating my sometimes chaotic world of ...
Master API architect at Layer7 Technologies Mike Amundsen (@mamund) has a great post this week on Four Tech-Related Trends That Will Shape 2013. One of the predictions that caught my eye was that ...
Master API architect at Layer7 Technologies Mike Amundsen (@mamund) has a great post this week on Four Tech-Related Trends That Will Shape 2013. One of the predictions that caught my eye was that ...
I recently added the Traffic and Weather podcast to the right hand menu for everyone to enjoy. What John Sheehan (@johnsheehan ) and Steve Marx (@smarx) are doing on the podcast is SO needed in the...
I had the pleasure of being on stage with Tim Herzog (@tgherzog), a Open Data Specialist from the World Bank yesterday at the DC API meetup at NPR. During the QA panel, at the end of the meetup, a ...
A new player in the Backend as a Service (BaaS) space has emerged, from former OpenFeint co-founder Peter Relan–called OpenKit. The new BaaS platform is targeting game developers, providing cross-...
I came to Washington DC this week for meetings with a couple federal agencies and a handful of private companies who contract with our government–including a conversation last night at the DC API M...
One of the top five concerns I hear from companies considering APIs is regarding losing control of their brand. With APIs being about access to raw data and resources, companies immediately think t...
App.net has just released a File API to add to their messaging and communication stack, allowing any App.net account to natively store files via the social platform. Each App.net account will be g...
App.net has just released a File API to add to their messaging and communication stack, allowing any App.net account to natively store files via the social platform. Each App.net account will be g...
Up until now we tend to think of APIs individually–we approach integration in terms of the Twilio API, Twitter API or the Facebook API. But as the number of public APIs has grown beyond 8K, and an ...
API ecosystems are all about research & development, and an opportunity for incubating ideas and apps in a way that invites 3rd party developers and companies to develop innovative ways of usin...
I just added a new feature to the right hand menu, for the podcast Traffic and Weather, a podcast about APIs and the cloud from John Sheehan (@johnsheehan) and Steve Marx (@smarx). I’m big podcast...
For the last seven years, when you wanted to find an API you went to ProgrammableWeb. It has been the definitive way to discover new APIs, and responsible for all the buzz in the space that has got...
I am invited to speak at the Washington DC API User Group, next Thursday January 31st 2013, at the NPR offices in Washington D.C. It looks like a pretty sweet linup of people, gathering for API me...
Google is migrating samples and tools for App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage to a new Github account, they are calling the Google Cloud Platform. Google is going al...
This post comes from the SDK Bridge newsletter. I find so much value from what Peter and Jonathan do over at SDK Bridge, I always have to post their newsletter here and share with all of you. Pro...
Google released an update to the Transparency Report today, showing information regarding government requests for users’ data on the Google Network. Google’s transparency report proves details on ...
I love to write. My girlfriend has really help me kindle this passion. Thank you @audreywatters. After 2.5 years of telling stories on API Evangelist, I’ve gotten pretty good at organizing my idea...
Google has an SDK early access program setup for the Google Drive platform, and is inviting a select group of dedicated Google Drive developers to join the program. Giving them access to upcoming G...
WSO2’s open source API management platform for creating, managing, consuming and monitoring APIs, now has the ability to track API usage through Google Analytics. Since APIs are deployed using HTT...
It is 30 days until the API Strategy & Practice conference in New York City, February 21st and 22nd, and the event is now sold out! The event will be a 275 person conference focused on discuss...
It is 30 days until the API Strategy & Practice conference in New York City, February 21st and 22nd, and the event is now sold out! The event will be a 275 person conference focused on discuss...
It has been a while since I provided an update on the White House Digital Strategy. I monitor the progress of federal agencies participation programmatically, using JSON reports published by each ...
Backend as a Service (BaaS), sometimes called Mobile Backend is a Service (MBaaS) is a growing trend I’m monitoring at API Evangelist. I’m tracking on 20 providers in the space, with two newly adde...
Finding APIs that compliment your API, and talking about the mutual benefits is nothing new. When I worked with the print API Mimeo, I would write code that used Mimeo API in conjunction with Box A...
I just posted a story on how I like the Guardian’s approach to data journalism, and spending time evolving on last nights thoughts about the possibilities of Markup APIs. As I’m migrating much of ...
Emergent One, one of the newest API management players on the block, just announced a new free development tier. The Emergent One platform provides simple, cloud-based tools for connecting to your...
I am a big fan of APIs that do one thing and do it well, like Twilio. I had lunch with the team from a similar API yesterday, called Mogreet. The Mogreet API lets you send and receive text or mult...
Over the holidays I added a new section to API Evangelist called “trends”. One of the areas I’m tracking on is what I’m calling “scripting platforms”. While you can program against any API using th...
I stumbled across the Google Civic Information API today, which allows developers to build applications around civic information including polling place, early vote location, candidate data, and el...
The mission of API Evangelist is centered around telling stories from the API space, shedding light on the innovative things developers and API providers are doing across all business sectors. Ove...
If you’ve met me in person, you know I always wear my logo on my t-shirt. I’m not a graphic designer, and when I needed a logo for API Evangelist, I just wrapped the words in JSON and called it go...
I’m rebooting the marketing and PR for the API Strategy & Practice conference after the holidayz. After finding a new date for the event on February 21st and 22nd, we’ve gone through the sessio...
I’m rebooting the marketing and PR for the API Strategy & Practice conference after the holidayz. After finding a new date for the event on February 21st and 22nd, we’ve gone through the sessio...
After looking back at 2012, I wanted a January 1, 2013 blog post for my blogs. My first blog post of 2012 was my tour schedule for January, 2012. While it was a pretty busy time for evangelizing an...
After looking back at 2012, I wanted a January 1, 2013 blog post for my blogs. My first blog post of 2012 was my tour schedule for January, 2012. While it was a pretty busy time for evangelizing ...
After looking back at 2012, I wanted a January 1, 2013 blog post for my blogs. My first blog post of 2012 was my tour schedule for January, 2012. While it was a pretty busy time for evangelizing an...
Storytelling in the API industry is critical to the healthy growth of the space. John Musser and ProgrammableWeb have been telling great stories in the tech industry, since way before APIs were all...
It’s been 2 weeks since New York City was hit by hurricane Sandy, and while things aren’t back to normal, everyone is beginning to look to the future, and starting the process of moving past the de...
It’s been 2 weeks since New York City was hit by hurricane Sandy, and while things aren’t back to normal, everyone is beginning to look to the future, and starting the process of moving past the de...
