Public APIs – Arghh Are Great
Last week they drove me crazy, but, the benefits of public APIs vastly outweigh the disadvantages. Richard MacManus has a good summary here of why public APIs, and the trends they are driving (Web 2.0), are so interesting: mash-ups, web as platform, the importance of letting go of your data, etc.. It’s all great stuff – and any one of those reasons should be enough to stop you from giving up on flickr. But the trend I’m most interested in is front-end innovation and data visualization. Nothing is enabling the development of interesting interfaces more than the availability of public data. The initial front-end innovations were the emergence of Ajax and mash-ups. But now Flash is playing a bigger role. And while mash-ups still get most of the press, and certainly housingmaps will forever be the Web 2.0 poster child (deservedly so), you don’t need to mash to innovate.
Building dBases with appropriate middleware (e.g. PHP) is a big effort. Most Flash developers don’t know how to build a dBase, and with only a certain amount of free time to experiment, don’t want to spend it learning mySQL. Plus, even if you made your own dBase, the data won’t be as interesting as flickr or Amazon. There were always a couple guys who were scraping – or building visualizations from a “kind of public” dataset. But, the opening up of APIs has everyone jumping in. There have probably been more Flash based flickr tools built in the last month than any previous month – and things just seem to be getting busier. As more applications get built, more people see them and get interested, more source is opened, the tools become more robust, and the integration gets easier. All those changes result in more applications being built and the cycle continues. It’s positive feedback. There have been similar periods of Flash experimentation in the past. A few years ago, everyone was building sites with Flash animations and experimental layouts. But, there’s a difference now. Because we’re using the same data, we’re tackling similar problems. And we’re tackling the same problems as the Ajax folks. More people working on the same problems lead to quicker and better solutions.
Also, even though many of the front-ends this month use one specific API (flickr), because all the interfaces are tied to an API that is trying to adhere to (or maybe create) an API standard, interface ideas and code should more easily port to other APIs – like delicious or lastFM. I am reaching a bit here as I have only worked with flickr. But, interface ideas around tags should work well with other tag based APIs. And code for accessing one API should be adaptable to accommodate another.
I won’t go back on my post from last week. Public APIs aren’t perfect. But, they are great. And they’re starting to have a big impact on Flash data visualization.
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