hi, im mcdavis

j2d2:

whitneymcn:

I had a conversation a couple of months ago with a wise and sage gentleman who casually tossed out the idea that APIs may benefit from being viewed as products in and of themselves, very much complementary to — but distinct from — the core product. It’s an interesting thought to play with.

caterpillarcowboy:

mcdavis:

Random Programming Notes: This is a screenshot from Firebug’s timer for AJAX calls.  Each call is calling an internal PHP page that pulls an API from one of three different services (Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr).  Notice two are almost identical in response time (this happens nearly every time).  

The one call that is different of the three (responding over 9 seconds after the call is originally made) is Tumblr.

I’m glad Tumblr has an API at all, but it’s really quite lackluster. I know they could do better if they wanted to. Which brings up an interesting point: when you introduce an API, you are deciding to create a second type of customer - the developer. And that customer should be treated with equal respect as any other customer, even if there are fewer of them. Too often companies will release an API because they can or because they should, and then leave it to rot. If you’re going to do it, do it all the way.

Though I generally agree, I think there are reasons to do some things part of the way, instead of the full way. Startup’s, in particular, are a place where we see this. It might be a side-effect of the recent coming of API’s for everything, but startups are starved of resources. Perhaps they built enough to get their mobile system working and have been spending their time elsewhere ever since.

I do agree that the API could use some love, but I like using Tumblr more than I care about the API.

The better the API, the better the possible experiences through the service/platform.  Let Twitter serve as a great example of this.

A few current features the API doesn’t seem to support:

• Replies
• Photo replies
• The “asker” of the question for answer posts 
• Content source (to be fair, this was just added to Tumblr)