The API Resource Timeline

I wanted to take my API industry timeline, or at least the last 20+ years and look at it differently. I wanted to generalize the digital resources that these companies were providing. Rather than just the moment in time, I wanted to consider how the accumulation of resources were making different things possible. I think I will go through and add a few other ones that maybe didn’t make the cut for my history, and think more about how we got here from a digital transformation point of view.

2000

Contacts, Relationships (Salesforce)

2000

Auctions, Products (eBay)

2002

Products, Affiliates (Amazon)

2003

Bookmarks (Delicious)

2003

Advertising (Google AdSense)

2004

Images (Flickr)

2005

Videos (YouTube)

2006

Object Storage (Amazon S3)

2006

Locations, Maps, Directions (Google Maps)

2006

Posts, Friends, Likes, Messages, Images, Videos (Facebook)

2006

Compute (Amazon EC2)

2006

Posts, Friends, Likes, Messages, Images, Videos (Twitter)

2007

SMS, Voice (Twilio)

2008

Code, Git (GitHub)

2008

Posts (Reddit)

2009

Locations (Foursquare)

2009

Emails (SendGrid)

2009

Database (Amazon RDS)

2009

Google Analytics API

2010

Thermosats (Nest)

2010

Images, Videos (Instagram)

2010

Compute (Docker)

2011

Wearables (Fitbit)

2011

Payments (Stripe)

2013

Messaging (Slack)

2014

Rides (Uber)

2014

APIs (Postman)

2014

Music (Spotify)

2016

Voice (Amazon Alexa Voice Service)