Beat the Economic Heat: Use Cool APIs
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008Hi, this is Ike Singh with a guest post on how utilizing APIs has helped my company FilmJamr with faster, scalable, wondefully cheaper and reliable development of our films based social networking site. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the word: API (Application Programming Interface), so im not going to get into defining it.
We use a lot of APIs, prominent being Amazon, Youtube, Netflix, Flickr and are working on a few more like Facebook Connect, Open Social, Live ID and Open ID implementation’s currently.
In this post I am going to focus on the point of view of an API consumer instead of an API provider, two very different sides of the coin.
The Fast & Cheap mantra:
In today’s economic environment our #1 objective is to “get to market fast and as cheaply as possible”. APIs have helped us do exactly that. Here is our recommended development mix strategy….
As soon as you have come up with that wonderful web 2.0, 3.0…. business idea, make a list of all your features. I’m sure that in most cases you can find freely available APIs to cover 30% of your feature set, pay to play APIs to cover 20%, strategic relationships to cover an additional 20% and you will need to develop only about 30-40% of the entire feature set yourself. A good source to find a directory of API’s is Programmable web.
API’s deter differentiation: Not necessarily true, let’s take the Lego example
At a recent conference Allen Hurff (SVP Engineering, MySpace) talked about APIs being like Lego. Allen took the example of how all Lego sets are the same but when you give them to a kid; it is pretty mind boggling to see the innovation and what they can create with the Lego’s.
In the same way the MySpace or Amazon API set is the same for every developer, but it’s the “secret sauce” the unique value add that will uncover the innovative differentiation of how you use, mash, add on to the API to create a business advantage. So focus all your energy on building out the unique value instead of tinkering with basic building blocks available as APIs all over.
The “Cool, but how are you going to make money?” question:
I’m sure all the entrepreneur readers are far too familiar with this question. In the social web world a lot of companies are dependent upon advertising as their primary source of revenue. But in these hard economic times there is too much ad inventory and shrinking ad budgets, thus integrating with affiliate program APIs (Amazon being the best) has helped us with add revenue streams and hopefully it will become our primary revenue generator in the near future.
Our experience as a .NET developer:
Myself and Bally (cofounder) are both ex-Microsoft and still believe in the Microsoft .NET development stack. But this has actually been very challenging as a lot of web 2.0 companies are LAMP based and the API documentation, forum support and samples are geared towards LAMP developers.
This has particularly been the case with Facebook and the Netflix API implementation. Thus for all you .NET developers out there, please feel free to reach out for any questions you might have.
I hope this helped.
Contact: ike@filmjamr.com or Twitter.
And do visit FilmJamr to Discover, Rate and Share great films with friends.
