Debunking APIs
Get fame and fortune from the Twitter API by John Allsopp
We all enjoy having a few adoring fans and the great thing about social media is your latest work might just go viral. A project that looks great and also does something interesting .. that’s worth talking about.
Enter the social media APIs.
An API, is a back door into a service such as Facebook, Twitter, Google or YouTube that allows a programmer to add much of the functionalities those services offer to your own project.
The mashup is one result, for instance here in the UK. We had a very snowy winter, and Ben Marsh created UK Snow which takes users’ snow reports from Twitter and plots them on a Google map using the Twitter API to gather the data, and the Google Maps API to plot it.
Ok that’s pretty nerdy (and even useless to you) but, consider these:
What would you do if you could just grab data and functionality from your favourite Web 2.0 service? What social media functionality could you add to your project to improve your users’ experience?
Don’t let the pre-packaged widgets stifle your imagination.
With a friendly programmer, stable, free and open APIs, you could add social media functionality to your project and, with a little luck thrown in, maybe get yourself some mass adulation..
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About the author: John Allsopp based in Scarborough, UK, is proficient in deeply technical stuff and helps people improve their business online. Nothing trashy, just continuing improvement.
Follow JohnAllsoppIM on Twitter
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