Top 10 API Blog Posts 2012

APIs have come more and more to the forefront of tech-thinking in 2012 and the year has seen some great thinking about API trends and the Web more generally. As an end of year muse we’ve collected our favorite posts for your year end reading list. Here they are, in no particular order! Enjoy:

• What Makes a Great API? / Adam DuVander at ProgrammableWeb: a short post but totally nails the key elements of what a great API needs (and led us to do a few posts of our own) – click through to John Musser’s great OSCON presentation on the same subject.

• The Secret to Amazon’s Success – Internal APIs / Kin Lane at API Evangelist: A spot on summary of what the API world can learn from Amazon based on Google (and ex. Amazon) Engineer Steve Yegge’s Goggle Internal Memo (which if you haven’t read is probably one of the best API posts of all time).

• Don’t use that open API — it could be a trap! / Mathew Ingram at GigaOm: while we don’t necessarily agree with the analysis (see our take here) – this was one of the early articles to dig into the thorny issue of platform ecosystems and how they evolve over time: a topic that subsequently became one of the defining API topics of 2012: who, what and when to trust platforms. This debate will no doubt gather steam in 2013 and there are already many other great posts out from Mathew Ingram, Dave Winer and many others.

• REST Web Services Demystified / Kirsten Jones at Infoworld: Great technical advice on how to use REST APIs collected in one place from Kirsten Jones – the stuff which nobody mentions that makes things so much easier and clearer. Developers are too often forgotten in the race for the perfect strategy.

• Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API / Kin Lane at API Evangelist: Highlighting the critical importance of the US Government’s announcement that all Federal Agencies must open APIs – something which, as it is beginning to happen, surely represents a watershed in society’s expectations of Governments in terms of data access. Kin goes above and beyond to provide a dashboard to track which agencies are making good on their task.

• Such a rich set of affordances” – A Hypermedia Tale – Mike Amundsen’s Presentation from Defrag Conference / Mike Amundsen @ Defrag 2012: A unique and fantastic way to explain Hypermedia and the difference between Hypermedia APIs and today’s APIs. You’ll want to hear the narrated version. On the same topic also see Steve Klabnik’s great How I invented HyperMedia APIs by Accident.

• The API-ificiation of software – and LEGOs and / Robin Vasan at GigaOm: two posts which give an interesting holistic view of how APIs look to transform software, the Web and business – as well as a great list of interesting, less talked about behind the scenes APIs.

• API Strategy: Know your Audience / Daniel Jacobson at Netflix: As a strategy and technical deep dive you can’t get better than Daniel’s presentation on the evolution of the Netflix API and how they have evolved over time on what really matters – not a blog post as such, but worth stretching for.

• APIs: The Power Transforming the Web / Ben Rooney at WSJ.com: while the tech press is filled with API content, Ben’s article is a great reminder how relevant APIs to the wider world and how far there still is to go in making the technologies involved accessible and usable.

• Why the App Economy Isn’t the App Economy, But the API Economy / Steven Willmott at PandoDaily: One of our own – talks about the underlyinging trend that many seem to miss – that value of the most successful businesses resides in the platform and not in one of the single interfaces.

There are a lot more worthy of mention ranging from Rackspace’s neat API Infographic or ProgrammableWeb’s cheat sheet on the metrics you should be measuring, or a journey to the lighter side with Webshell’s {“apis”:”the joy”} – genius (go ahead – we’ll wait)!

What were your favorites we missed?! – stick them in the comments!

Happy Holidays to all!