Much of BlueWall’s current experimentation exists within the exciting creative space emerging in the intersections of social media and digital multimedia. We call it the Mashup, and as early explorers of the emerging opportunities engendered by this concept, we are fully equipped for acting as the Sherpa to lead your company into the future of digital and creative media that is easy to create, monetize, distribute and syndicate.
Below is a longer description geared towards helping you to pinpoint the most appropriate and effective Mashup plan to capitalize on your current and future global business opportunities:
An API is a robust technical interface for accessing and sorting information using a program instead of a human brain. Roughly speaking, it's the difference between providing data as paint versus a finished painting, like a larger version of presenting a chart or table using a dynamic spreadsheet document instead of a static image file. By offering an API in addition to the usual presentation of your content (on your own web site, in a printed publication, etc – that's the JPEG), you allow others to work with it, perhaps to write their own related web apps or programs. Accessible information helps you further your lead in your niche by creating a network of added value around your content – and you don't necessarily have to fund it.
For example, because the iPhone has a hardware API used by apps to control its various components, and because YouTube has a content API used for managing videos, it's possible to create an app which shoots a video using the phone's onboard camera and then automatically uploads it to your YouTube user account. Without the APIs, you'd need to shoot, wait, sync the iPhone with its home computer, edit or otherwise prepare the file, visit YouTube's site in a web browser, and only then would you be able to upload your new video. This integration increases the usefulness of both YouTube and the phone, so it's in the interest of both companies to develop and support good APIs.
Now, the preceding example discussed combining two very popular constituent elements, which sounds really cool, but both parts come from powerful technology companies which have highly funded development teams and probably work together in much deeper ways than simply sharing API documentation. But the utility of a good API becomes even more apparent when those extensive resources aren't in place. For example, a small shop that does a lot of business on eBay might use eBay's API to relatively cheaply develop a custom control panel application that allows them to email activity updates to all employees simultaneously, and then allow authorized managers to make administrative decisions about the listed items via email reply. Once they've done that, they can operate their transactions from a wide variety of devices, not just the store's main computer.
The most important element of an API is that it must use standardized data formats which are widely supported in many computer languages. Good candidates for this include JSON andXML, which can be decoded in a wide variety of programming contexts and thus make your data available to many different developers no matter which platform they may prefer. You never know – some teenage wizard in Omaha might write the next brilliant tool that will change your market. You just have to let him get at the information.
Many APIs take the form of web services. Essentially, this is just a special URL where small changes to the address result in small changes to the page content, and that page is in a format that can be decoded by the geeks. Or even non-geeks, for that matter. Consider the following URL:
http://www.grocerystore.com?item=IceCream&action=ListFlavors
It's pretty clear what will be at the other end of that link, isn't it? Thats right – a list of the various ice cream flavors available at the store. So now you've got the data needs of the dairy dessert market covered.
Let's be honest, freeing the data for the betterment of humanity sounds great in principle, but the truth is that many of us operate in a cut-throat capitalist market where “knowledge is power” applies, at least as far as “information can sometimes be a competitive advantage.” Despite this, you are a few reasons why you should think long and hard about whether to hoard your data or content in secrecy.
The first is that you get to decide what to offer through the API. Anything which might turn into a problem for you need not be included at all, or perhaps just included in a secret and secure manner and shared only with trusted partners. For example, the API entry for a particular product can include the title, price, and description, but not the wholesale price or negative customer reviews.
The second is that you can define “terms of service” for your API, which means that the other party enters into an agreement when they access your information, and you can use this to your advantage. A few APIs actually manage to charge money for access to crucial industry-defining information. Far more simply have branding requirements; if your epicurean magazine maintains a large database of recipes, making them available via API with such a licensing agreement can get the company logo placed on any site that might want to discuss cooking and recipes without paying a huge staff chefs to come up with them.
The third is that you can maintain control over how your information, and pull the plug if you don't like the results. You wouldn't even have to kill the entire API – you can specifically exclude a specific developer. You see, some APIs support extremely sophisticated authentication, without which any data request will just result in a response message roughly equivalent “Sorry, I can't do that.” Google tends to use these with any web app that requires a Gmail login.
But complex authentication is better for cases where many users will need to access many individual data sets, all of which are sensitive – email is a perfect example of this. For situations where privacy and encryption aren't as important, there's a much easier solution. You can force developers to register for an “API key” before you unlock your data for them – then you just generate a small alphanumeric code tied to their registration, and only send out responses when the request includes a valid code. This allows you to track the use of your data, remove access at will, and automatically build up a registry of every developer who is working with your data set.
Maybe you don't even have a cool product yet, or a library of content or information which the world needs to see. That's OK – APIs can still help you.
Whenever other people release APIs, they create the opportunity for you to create data mashups, which are just services that combine existing information in new and interesting ways. One of the experiments which turned a lot of heads a few years ago took stories from the New York Times, extracted keywords, and used those to query the Flickr API, resulting in a stream of news stories and related photographs. Or let's connect our earlier hypothetical epicurean magazine to the hypothetical grocery store – maybe you could mash the recipes up against product databases to create shopping lists and figure out which stores have the ingredients you need. And, why not, let's bring a third API into the picture – perhaps Google Maps, where we plot the shopping lists on a map and then send driving directions to your smartphone. All of a sudden you've created a clever and unprecedented new web property, highly useful to your target demographic, and all you needed was a little creativity, access to data sets, and someone who can put those pieces together.
So, what do you want to build?
