brad garland

API is an acronym for ‘Application Programming Interface’ and the wikipedia definition is as follows:

An application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for service to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them.

One of the most well-know APIs around is easily the Google Maps API; which gives people the ability to use the cool AJAX’ed maps and port it over to there own uses, here are some sites that have used that API:

GVisit.com
Gmap-Pedometer.com
Geomint

With a lot of new applications coming to the market in recent months some developers have decided to include an API with their own applications so others can use it to mashup in their own ways.

I am an avid reader of Adaptive Path’s essays and was reading one today, located here, and it got me thinking about how all web-based apps should be required, by law, to have an API with their products.

We are quickly becoming an Internet society that are using all these different tools and applications and there is no good way, currently, to centralize our Web experience. If I want to go and check out my bookmarks, then photos, and then bank account I am going to three different URLs. That takes quite a bit of time to get logged in, which can ruin the experience for the majority of the people and is slowing the adoption of some of these services.

My hope is to have at least all web-based apps required to have an API with their service as soon as they launch. This will allow others to perform mashups into their own applications and improve the way people would use the Internet. The ‘Net would then come across to the novice user as a seamless state.

Some sites like netvibes are on the right track but are limited based off of who does and doesn’t not offer APIs for their applications and thankfully RSS seems to be catching on rather quickly but the majority of Internet users knows nothing about. Anyway, just thought I’d rant on that a bit and hopefully readers would continue the debate in the comments section.

All for now.

[tags]APIs, API, wikipedia, Google Maps, AJAX, Adaptive Path, Internet experience, netvibes, RSS, web 2.0[/tags]