An Essential Stack of Existing API Resources

by Kin Lane on 03/14/2013

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 mobile and web app users.

The best example of this is with authentication. Its growing more and more common that you don’t build your own login, you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google or Github oAuth.

It seems to me that when it comes to other common resources, the same could be applied. So I’m exploring what my essential stack of API driven resources might look like:

Messages

Photos

Documents

Videos

Notes

Bookmarks

Blog

Contacts

Checkins

Audio

Calendar

Payments

Advertising

URL Shortener

I could do quite a bit with this assembled as a single backend stack, if it included a regular datastore, key-value store, user management and other essentials for building apps.

It seems to me that new platforms shouldn’t always create new silos, but bridge the existing ones that we depend on already.