Application Features vs. API
Interesting article over at Skype Journal talking about the Skype application and how the API stinks. Their main point is that an API can be tacked on to an application, or can be the core on which the application is built. If an application is built with the API at the core, it can become a platform that others can build on top of. If the API is an afterthought, it will not empower the greater community of developers to adopt the platform and extend it beyond what the application developers can do. They posit that Skype hasn’t embraced the API and won’t take off as a platform until they do.
A lot of applications are playing API catch up right now. You almost can hear the CEO saying at staff meetings, “We need an API for web 2.0!” They have a long way to go to catch up with Google, Salesforce.com, and others who have realized that the API is key to putting power into the hands of developers. And by giving outside developers power, they give their application huge competitive advantage.
Interesting API as Platform tidbits:
- Google released a feed reader application a few months ago. Frankly, it was a pretty lackluster application that lacked a lot of usability and functionality in other tools like Bloglines. But then I heard the real story–Google built the news reading API first, then built the reader app on top of that as a proof of concept. To them, the API is the important product. Wow. That is commitment to the platform, not the application.
- Fully half of the traffic that hits Salesforce.com’s CRM application does not come to their web app–it accesses the API. Half of their traffic could care less that the web front end even exists.
To the application builders out there: Do you have your API closest to heart? Or are you building your functionality first, and creating the API later? Firefox and Chandler are two examples of open source software projects that focused on API in their early stages. Problem was, neither had any features to show for at least the first year of their existence. That stunk in the short term, but look where Firefox is, and a lot of it’s popularity comes from the Extensions that people build against their API. And what about Chandler. You haven’t heard about this project? In 3 years you will have–I think it’s going to be wildly successful because they are taking the API driven aproach.
API driven services are the future, and it’s one of the big reasons I chose Salesforce.com as our CRM platform. Power to the People!
