Joy and APIness

Me and my MatrixChatting with some geek friends the other night we were trying to work out why Twitter was winning out amongst “micro blogging” services despite having stability problems and fewer features.

I argued that it was almost certainly community. People go where the people are. Just look at eBay. It looks like ass, isn’t particularly user friendly, and hasn’t really improved much over the years in comparison to glossier competitors, but buyers and sellers flock there because that is where the action is.

My friends agreed but had a different take. Twitter, you see was first with the public API.

A public API is a way to allow third party programmers to take advantage of your service in their own software. They get access to your features so they can build applications that integrate and extend the basic system.

In Twitters case this means there are several desktop applications that make it easier and more productive to Tweet, plus services nobody at the company could have predicted that rank, graph and link up users in creative ways. Pownce on the other hand rarely makes a headline in comparison.

My learned friends are on to something I think. Twitter are not the first to offer API access. One of the things I love about Flickr is that I can geek out on the techy innards of the service. This last weekend I re-wrote a script that downloads all the pictures from my Flickr library. Loads of people have written cool tools that work with Flickr, from uploaders to picture galleries, screensavers and WordPress plugins.

It’s not always clear initially how a public API will help a company. When Yahoo! released their API many people thought they were playing into black hat SEO and spammers hands. I am sure though in the case of Twitter it has given them a competitive advantage.

I still think I am right and it is the community that brings people back to Twitter, but I am willing to admit their API helped attract that community :)

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0

Comments

6 Responses to “Joy and APIness”

  1. Mukund Mohan on February 7th, 2008 10:04 pm

    The API was less important than the “open” nature of the system. Sure many people developed “apps” on twitter, but the concept of open discussion or conversation is more powerful than a developer API to plug new items in

  2. Chris Shouse on February 7th, 2008 10:15 pm

    It is the community and friends feel on Twitter that makes it fun and atractive. I never felt that with Pownce.

  3. Chris Garrett on February 7th, 2008 10:35 pm

    Twitter also had the advantage of being first to market, meaning they had both community and content to convert new visitors with.

    Pownce on the other hand is severely lacking in “action” and have just tried to sell the fact that it was founded by K.Rose.

    It’s also interesting to note that Twitter offers a higher level of customisation than Pownce, could draw some link to MySpace vs. Facebook here.

  4. Chris Garrett on February 8th, 2008 2:15 am

    @Mukund – Yes I think openness is important but I don’t think it was the most important factor

    @Chris – The community is what keeps me. Pownce hasn’t really taken off in the circles I move in

    @Chris – It’s always confusing when you turn up, who is which Chris Garrett? ;) I agree, most of the buzz around Pownce is the fact people want it to be another success for Mr Rose but I don’t think it is anywhere near rev3 or digg

  5. Scramblejam on February 8th, 2008 11:19 am

    I think that Twitters success lies in having found that sweet spot between ease of use for community building, and the power of the API.

    They have a nice set-up I think, and are very encouraging of new applications built on their system – Combine all of these points and you have a great recipe for a new service… and it’s clearly working!

  6. Chris Garrett on February 8th, 2008 2:02 pm

    Yup, you are right, it is having the right *mix* that has done it, despite all their downtime they got the right ingredients together

Leave a Reply