I have been profiling all of the Google APIs lately, a process that always yields a significant amount of stories for my notebook. One element of Google's approach to delivering APIs that I found relevant in the Google+ portal, was their embeddable tooling. This is an area of the API lifecycle I'm regularly evangelizing, and always looking for good examples to support my research.
I think that the six embeddable tools Google offers up as part of their social API represent the top embeddable tooling I see across this space. Partially because of the dominance of social media platform, but also because they make sense to end-users, and accomplish common things that people want to accomplish online.
Share, follow, and vote buttons are relevant to any platform with user accounts. Is yours available via API, enabling this type of tools? Then the badges, snippets, and embedded posts are relevant to any company, organization, institution, and agency looking to share content over the web (everyone wants to do this). I'm going to start a list of essential embeddable building blocks, providing a getting started list for companies looking to develop embeddable tooling for their consumers--Google gives me another good reference to add to my research.
I wish someone would start an API embeddables service, something like Zapier, but for embeddable content, tooling, and actions. I've talked about this in terms of conversational interfaces, but think there is an opportunity to do specifically for API-driven content. Allowing people to easily authenticate, and generate profile badges, embeddable content listings and details, and other long tail content opportunities. I'll keep beating this drum until something emerges--because it is what I do.
