Blog

Reminder of Why Data Portability Should Be Default: Bye Bye Posterous

by Kin Lane on 05/01/2013

I was a Posterous user. I didn't rely on the platform for anything. It was just, yet another endpoint in my world of content production. So I was not that upset when they announced they were shutting down(I would link to post, but its gone). But I was just checking the blog feed of an API that I monitor. It came up in my alert dashboard as a feed that wasn't pulling. I clicked on the link to test, and: Just a reminder that in ALL platforms, data portability needs to be default. Either an API or at least an archive download as HTML, JSON, CSV or other common, open format.... read more.

Tags: Kin Lane

API Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Forego Talking to a Person

by Kin Lane on 04/30/2013

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, John walks us through his “Three Commandments for Using Someone Else’s API”, which, after listening to him talk about his story on Episode 8 of Traffic and Weather, I couldn't stop thinking about commandment #2: Thou Shalt Not Forego Talking to a Person An open API is a great way to test drive an integration, but it does not absolve you from the responsibility of building a relationship with the provider. If you can’t reach someone, that should be all the reason you need not to use that API. This commandment comes out of Johns unique experience which spans: Twilio - Experience managing large, successful developer ecosystem IFTTT - Experience being consumer of not just one, but many APIs Runscope - Providing tools that make API developers lives easier This experiences is what make John’s perspective unique. He doesn’t just understand delivering APIs and managing developers, he knows what it is like to be a developer and consumer of APIs.... read more.

Tags: API Evangelist, Developers, Ecosystem, Ifttt, John Sheehan, Runscope, Traffic and Weather, Twilio

An Author Walk-Through of a Story in Audio

by Kin Lane on 04/30/2013

I was finally catching up on all my podcasts this week, which includes Traffic and Weather, which is an always informative source of news and commentary podcast about APIs and the cloud hosted by @smarx and @johnsheehan While listening to Episode 8: I’m going to withdraw my objection, John Sheehan discusses his March story in NextWeb called APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs. It was very interesting to hear him describe his intent behind the post and walk us through his points. I read the original article back in March, jotted down some notes, but really didn't trigger much beyond that. After listening to him talk about the post, it renewed some very interesting points for me--which I'm working through an dyou will see in future blog posts. It is a lot of work to craft a good quality blog posts that conveys difficult and often abstract API concepts to a wide audience. I struggle with getting my ideas across, as well as coherency in much of my writing. This got me thinking, maybe as part of my storytelling process I can try to work in an audio version, of me walking my readers (listeners) through it. I'm not talking about something that reads the post to you.... read more.

Tags: Kin Lane

API Trends

by Kin Lane on 04/28/2013

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, using the blogosphere, Twitter, LinkedIn, Github and the open web looking for examples of how people are using APIs in different ways. Currently I monitor the blogs of 804 API related companies and 205 blog feeds from other news and blog sources, as well as around 1000 API twitter accounts. As I read and curate this every day, I tag items according to a process I've evolved over 3 years of operation. Then at the end of each week I look at which tags are trending for the week, based upon what I've written and other news items I've curated along the way. This is how I monitor trends. When Is see a tag trending, and I feel the area is interesting or has potential, I tend to spin off the topic into its own trend area. Now I can monitor it separately and potentially give it more attention, with the hope of finding new sources of information, companies and domain experts in this area.... read more.

Tags: Aggregation, API Evangelist, Backend as a Service, Realtime, Reciprocity, trends

API Priorities

by Kin Lane on 04/28/2013

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 that evolution, I'm getting my priorities in order. While I may get excited about cloud computing APIs or quantified self APIs, there are other areas I think are straight up priorities--ones that we can't ignore. To support this I'm launching several research projects into areas I have labeled as API priorities: Federal Government City Government Education Healthcare Libraries Universities These represent areas I'm actively doing research in, looking for the best APIs, tools, services, building blocks and news while also generating as much analysis and white papers as I can to help define what is going on. As with all of the API Evangelist network of research projects, everything is a work in progress and represents what I have time to dive into.... read more.

Tags: API Evangelist, City Government, Education, Federal Government, Healthcare, Libraries, Priorities, Universities

Have You Taken A Look At AT&T APis Lately?

by Kin Lane on 04/28/2013

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 very telling about their strategy. This is one thing I like about my API monitoring platform, is that I'm forced to dive deeper into companies that are ubiquitous in the space, and make sure I'm kep in tune with where they are actually going. I thought AT&T's API catalog was interesting in its current state: Advertising - Create a new revenue stream through the use of customized advertising. The Advertising API allows you to incorporate a simple, easy-to-use solution that supports revednue share-based monetization of your apps through the placement of paid advertising. Call Management - Pick a virtual telephone number and add real time, cross-carrier voice, and SMS communications to your app. Device Capabilities - Returns important information about a device—allowing you to customize your apps accordingly. In-app Messaging - Drive further engagement with your customers by allowing them to share information with friends and family directly from within your app.... read more.

Tags: Advertising, API Evangelist, AT&T, Healthcare, Telco, Television

Helping People Understand APIs Through Real World Examples

by Kin Lane on 04/27/2013

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 very abstract concepts that are APIs. While going for a walk today I was thinking back when I use to build technology for my parents trucking company, when one of the fuel expenses was for Commercial Fueling Network (CFN), which is a self-service commercial fueling station. Whether your a long haul trucker or local contractor, you can use CFN to get at an essential resource for your business, whatever the application. Any business can apply and join CFN, get a "key" to access fuel resources in a self-service way. APIs are the same approach to selling any "virtual" online resource, as CFN is to selling a "physical" fuel resource. CFN doesn't just put free gas alongside the road for anyone to take. They have a portal where you know to go to get your resources, providing you with a key to access the fuel resources you need. CFN then bills you for the usage of their resource. You can be sure CFN has extensive data on how much fuel they sell and who it was sold to.... read more.

Tags: API Evangelist, CFN, Commercial Fueling Network, Fuel, Gas, Resources

Evolving Beyond API Service Providers and Tools to Goal Based API Toolkits

by Kin Lane on 04/27/2013

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 effort I’m reorganizing API Evangelist site into a network of small story groups, so that I can focus on a specific piece of this expanding API universe. Each portion of API Evangelist will run using what I call my Hacker Storytelling format, where I use Github Page, Jekyll along with a variety of JSON driven widgets that tell a story around a specific topic. The first story group I’m tackling is redefining two of my main sections which I had called “service provider” and “tools”. My original intent was to find resources people could use to deploy APIs, and if it was an online service I put it in service providers and if you could download and install, it went under tools.... read more.

Tags: API Evangelist, Consumption, Deployment, Design, Discovery, Evangelism, Management, Monetization, Toolkits

Who Are The Customers For Your Startup?

by Kin Lane on 04/26/2013

Silicon Valley builds amazing apps! We need customers to use our apps Hopefully we get lots of customers who use our apps! We can also launch an API, and become a platform Now we have developers as customers Now we have our developers customers as customers We need $$ to operate and scale our platform, APIs and apps Now we add investors as our customers Our investors want us to give them ROI with a good exit Now we have other larger companies as potential customers Who is the customer of your startup?... read more.

Tags: Kin Lane

Lack of Cloud Awareness Impacted Twitters Perspective, Setting Bad Tone for How It Deals With Ecosystem

by Kin Lane on 04/26/2013

I just listened The Clouds, by Benjamen Walker on SoundCloud. In this episode a Twitter employee named Britt Selvitelle talks about what happened when Justin Bieber joined Twitter in 2009 and how everything had changed by the time the Bieber joined Instagram in 2011. According to the story, when Bieber joined Twitter it was all hands on deck and they were in panic mode because of the demand it put on their infrastructure, but when Bieber joined Instagram in 2011, the situation was dfferent because Instagram ran on the AWS cloud. Selvitelle from Twitter even jokes about how, when he ran into Instagram founder Mike Krieger at a party and mentioned it, he fully expected it to have been a nightmare for them as well. Selvitelle admits having "missed" the cloud revolution because he was heads down at Twitter. I can't help but think, how their approach to their infrastructure, the lack of awareness regarding the cloud and their fire drill approach to times when their infrastructure is slammed, ultimately set the tone for their decisions to rate limit, and established the beginning of their defensive stance against developers in the ecosystem.... read more.

Tags: API Voice