STEEM API: How the STEEMIT API can benefit websites such as: Wikileaks, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit

Before reading my post, I do have some questions myself as I still dont fully understand the implications of this. Please feel free to brainstorm below. I do think the implications could be quite large.

My questions for the community to think about as you are reading this:

1. In what sort of ways do you think websites like this would benefit from implementing the API?
2. What reasons do you think they would have implementing STEEM vs BITCOIN for this type of thing?

• Separate question:
  *For wikileaks specifically I understand steemit has immutable posts on the blockchain. Could Wikileaks benefit from this feature? - if they implemented steems API some how?

related articles:

1. http://readwrite.com/2013/10/17/is-facebook-the-worlds-largest-open-source-company/
2. https://steemit.com/steemjs/@fabien/steem-api-now-released
3. https://steemit.com/steem/@steemrollin/steemtube-idea-youtube-version-of-steemit

Below I'll give you guys an idea of what the implications of the API are for anyone who is not technically inclined. I hope this article can open your eyes into the possibilities / current implications the steemit platform may have.

APIs: Windows To The Code

First we must understand the value and importance of API's before you can understand the implications for STEEM. Today, the APIs we think about most often – like Twitter’s and Facebook’s – typically handle requests generated by people clicking on a website or swiping and tapping on an app. But another, far more interesting potential for APIs lies in processing requests generated by machines – a market that could hit $18 billion in spending by 2014.

Think of the smart, Internet-connected energy meters being adding to homes. Or diagnostic sensors in your car that report back to the manufacturer when there are signs of an incipient engine failure. Or systems that detect atypical network traffic and reroute it on the fly to avoid slowdowns or outages. These all need defined rules for how one machine talks to another. And those rules are found in – you guessed it – APIs. APIs that need to be managed.

That’s the real growth market for APIs. And it suggests that what we’ve seen in the past week is only the first glimmer of a vein of gold that smart people will mine for decades to come.

In the simplest terms, APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can talk to another. APIs aren’t at all new; whenever you use a desktop or laptop, APIs are what make it possible to move information between programs—for instance, by cutting and pasting a snippet of a LibreOffice document into an Excel spreadsheet. System-level APIs makes it possible for applications like LibreOffice to run on top of an OS like Windows in the first place.

On the Web, APIs make it possible for big services like Google Maps or Facebook to let other apps “piggyback” on their offerings. Think about the way Yelp, for instance, displays nearby restaurants on a Google Map in its app, or the way some video games n2ow let players chat, post high scores and invite friends to play via Facebook, right there in the middle of a game.

APIs do all this by “exposing” some of a program’s internal functions to the outside world in a limited fashion. That makes it possible for applications to share data and take actions on one another’s behalf without requiring developers to share all of their software’s code. Code-sharing on that scale wouldn’t just ruffle the feathers of programmers who’d rather keep it secret; it would also be grossly inefficient.

That’s true even for open-source programs. Who has the time to comb through all the code for somebody else’s application—which, trust me, can be awfully messy—just to use one function? (It’s also possible to run into tricky licensing issues if you’re not careful.)

APIs simplify all that by limiting outside program access to a specific set of features—often enough, requests for data of one sort or another. Feel free to think of them as doors, windows or levers if you like. Whatever the metaphor, APIs clearly define exactly how a program will interact with the rest of the software world—saving time, resources and potentially nasty legal entanglements along the way. Once Facebook and others can understand STEEM I wonder if they stand to benefit from our API in any way.

How APIs Work

These days, APIs are especially important because they dictate how developers can create new apps that tap into big Web services—social networks like Facebook or Pinterest, for instance, or utilities like Google Maps or Dropbox.3 The developer of a game app, for instance, can use the Dropbox API to let users store their saved games in the Dropbox cloud instead of working out some other cloud-storage option from scratch.

In one sense, then, APIs are great time savers. They also offer user convenience in many cases; Facebook users undoubtedly appreciate the ability to sign into many apps and Web sites using their Facebook ID—a feature that relies upon Facebook APIs to work.

Viewed more broadly, though, APIs make possible a sprawling array of Web-service “mashups,” in which developers use mix and match APIs from the likes of Google or Facebook or Twitter to create entirely new apps and services. In many ways, the widespread availability of APIs for major services is what’s made the modern Web experience possible.

When you search for nearby restaurants in the Yelp app for Android, for instance, it will plot their locations on Google Maps instead of creating its own maps. Via the Google Maps API, the Yelp app passes the information it wants plotted—restaurant addresses, say, along with the Yelp star rating and more—to an internal Google Maps function that then returns a Map object with restaurant pins in it at the proper locations. Which Yelp can then display inside its app. (On iOS, Yelp taps Apple’s Maps API for the same purpose.)

We see APIs like this all the time. Even here on Steemit like the one below this post.. These are just links that call on the APIs associated with each of those services to allow users to Tweet or post about an article without leaving the site itself. APIs also allow our comment system, run by a service called Disqus, to accept user comments and then display them right here on ReadWrite without our intervention. I wonder if this could be the final link to mass adoption of crypto?

Why the API Economy matters for companies like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit?

There are five main reasons why companies should embrace web APIs such as Steemits and become an active participant in the API Economy:

1. Grow your customer base by attracting them to your products and services.
2. Drive innovation by capitalizing on the composition of different APIs, yours and third parties.
3. Improve the time-to-value and time-to-market for new products.
4. Improve integration (across channels) with web APIs.
5. Participate in a new era of computing and prepare for an uncertain future.

What is a business purpose platform?

Business purpose platforms enable creation and growth of digital products for an enterprise without your company being the creator. Platforms allow thousands or millions of developers to build products or thousands of partners. Platforms improve brand and add value for your clients and partners. A network effect occurs as more users, developers, or companies join. Platforms enable economic activity. That is, a force multiplier is created where your company appears bigger than it actually is.

API platforms represent an important new dimension of focus for companies. API platforms allow companies to consistently deliver APIs as building blocks for customer, partners, and developers. This newly created, evolving, and diffused network of API enables creation of new capabilities and business models. It also results in newly created partnerships between providers and consumers.

How are companies adopting APIs?

The figure shows API adoption models which reflect four distinct models of adoption. The API adoption model is not a maturity model as organizations may find themselves adopting one or more adoption models based on product innovation, experience in next generation platforms, goals in re-inventing customer relationships or simply the business becoming digital as it competes with companies born during the cloud and Internet eras.

API discovery and experimentation is often the first step towards adopting an API strategy. It targets experimentation with one or more API services. Platform selection and targeted expansion goes beyond the testing the waters phase and seeks to expand the adoption of APIs into additional business use cases. Businesses taking this approach are seeking revenue growth oriented efforts, new products and services, and simply new customer value to extend their business capabilities to a wider audience.
Re-imagining of core processes occurs as a broader strategic adoption by executives of API-based scalable services, as the business centric approach for transformational thinking to transform core business processes.
Business-as-a-service built on Next Gen API ecosystems is where web era companies begin and often have an advantage in enabling novel capabilities, turning clients into partners and embracing new business models.

What are examples of companies taking advantage of the API economy?

Examples abound in every industry with Amazon and Salesforce being poster children for leveraging the API Economy, companies building with a next generation platforms, moving beyond enterprise IT to an API strategy. Incumbents can look to start-ups as examples of API-enabled disruptive business models. Traditional enterprises such as banks see disruptions in loans and payments as examples: Zopa is leading peer-to-peer lending service in the UK. Since Zopa was founded in 2005 it has lent more than £651 million in peer-to-peer loans26. Stripe is a company that facilitates individuals and businesses to accept payments through Internet and mobile devices using APIs. Stripe enables frictionless payment transactions through a feature rich API creating a developer friendly way to accept payments online and in mobile apps. Stripe processes billions of dollars a year. Mint.com is another service and it helps individuals get a handle on their finances by organizing and categorizing spending. Mint’s service pulls the entire individual's accounts information into one place. Using Mint’s free mobile app allows individuals to track their money whenever they are in the world. Imagine the possibilities for STEEMIT and the massive world of social media platforms and users out there.

Sources:

1. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/api-good-technology-explained/
2. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/API.html
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface
4. http://www.programmableweb.com/api-university/what-are-apis-and-how-do-they-work
5. http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined/
6. http://www.govtech.com/applications/Whats-an-API-and-Why-Do-You-Need-One.html
7. https://www.glowtouch.com/blog/cloud/importance-apis-business/
8. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7440379/what-exactly-is-the-meaning-of-an-api