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APIs in Commerce and Social Media

The current wave of APIs we find ourselves in began around 2000 with a handful of API pioneers who decided to do things a little differently.

APIs in commerce

Early web APIs escaped from the controlled service-oriented architecture (SOA) experiment in the enterprise and began to be applied to sales, products, affiliates, auctions, and the other expanding areas of the e-commerce shift.

  • Salesforce - From day one, Salesforce had a crude set of XML over HTTP web APIs to help the new startup compete against established thousand-pound gorillas, changing the conversation around how we manage our business relationships.
  • Amazon - Amazon - The commerce powerhouse was using APIs to expand its network of sellers via affiliate marketing networks, but would forever change how we do business as part of its own API-first transformation, which resulted in what we now know as Amazon Web Services.
  • eBay - eBay - eBay saw early on the potential of APIs to transform the auction business. It also saw the value of ongoing investment in API-first transformation, helping the organization evolve beyond auctions to become the commerce giant it is today.

APIs in social media

The digital experience was rapidly becoming a social affair, with images, links, and other digital resources becoming more shareable via APIs. APIs were also expanded to define our profiles, connections, and the networks where we share these images and links.

  • Flickr - The image platform saw the potential of APIs for making images available across the fast-growing world of blogging. It also saw early on how APIs enabled the next generation of business development through self- service offerings.
  • Facebook - The top social network platform has leveraged its original platform to build out a global platform of human interaction, gaining a competitive edge by featuring images with Instagram and messaging with WhatsApp.
  • Twitter - The entire Twitter empire was built in its API community. When the company began, it was a simple interface. Once the API was released, we got a mobile application, buttons, widgets, and everything else that has helped the network grow.

Commerce plus social media would provide the rich substrate we would need to begin building the new digital economy, but the system was missing other essential concepts needed to take us into the future. Selling products and connecting people were powerful uses of the web. Later, APIs would demonstrate the power of reducing common digital objects into API commodities.