If I find a new company during my research, it takes me about a minimum of 15 minutes to lightly profile what they are up, and add to my system, and if I do a full profile, it can take several hours. All of this adds up to a lot of work, time that would be better spent on actually writing stories, hacking on the APIs, and publishing of the longer form research papers on what I’m seeing.
In an ideal world, each of these APIs would have an APIs.json in the root of their domain, with details about the company and people responsible for API operations, and as much information about each API as possible. With a single click, I could import the entire profile of a company, and its valuable API resources into my monitoring system, ready for publishing to relevant areas of the API Evangelist network, as well as some of my partner sites like APIs.io--the beauty is, so could anyone else. ;-)
If API providers used APIs.json, I could be connected to their Blog via RSS, their platform Twitter account via the Twitter API, and their Github profile or organization using the Github API. Not only would I have relevant metadata about a company like their name, description, logo, and details about APIs, I would also be connected to a real-time heartbeat of API operations via the platform blog, Twitter, and Github accounts. This is just the start--there are numerous other building blocks you could wire up with an APIs.json file, to keep potential consumers up to speed.
I know it can be hard to se the potential for APIs.json, because there is limiting tooling available currently, beyond the open source search engine APIs.io, Even before the next wave of tooling like the internal enterprise search engine, visualizations, browser plugins, and other tooling are available, you can realize the benefit of being listed on APIs.io, and make sure you are fully plugged into my regular monitoring of the API space, which means the chances are much, much higher that I will write a story about what you, and your developers are up to. ;-)
