What is the gold standard for website APIs? Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc
Seems like there are two categories of APIs for websites today.
APIs which allow the functionality of the site to be extended like Facebook, Myspace, etc. These APIs seem to be very diverse.
APIs which allow interaction with the existing site functionality like Twitter, Flickr, etc. These all claim to be REST based, but are in reality simply "data over HTTP".
If you were creating a website that allowed both functional extension and outside interaction, what existing APIs would you use as a reference model?
Answer
We're doing some research in this area ourselves. Not a lot out there in terms of "gold standard" for website API references.
The most common website APIs referenced are:
- Google APIs http://developers.google.com/api-client-library/java/apis
- Amazon S3 http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/
- Twitter https://dev.twitter.com/
- Facebook http://developers.facebook.com/
- LinkedIn http://developer.linkedin.com/index.jspa
- Delicious http://delicious.com/help/api
- YouTube http://www.youtube.com/dev
- Netflix http://developer.netflix.com/
- Sun Cloud API http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis/pages/Home
Another list here:
http://www.pingable.org/the-top-15-web-apis-for-your-site/
Someone recommended the book Restful Web Services as a good reference on this.
(please feel free to edit the above list to add other high profile websites with APIs)