Who’s Building your Brand’s E-Presence?
APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are the “middleman” between web services like Facebook & Twitter and desktop or mobile applications.
They’re being released by application/service providers at an increasing rate. But there’s a fine line between allowing access to a brand’s data for the sake of experience enhancement and essentially delegating software development to the developer community at large. Walking this line is difficult, but finding yourself on the wrong side may find your brand alienating both consumers and developers.
To illustrate my point, this post will discuss three scenarios involving two real companies and one fictional company. (In all honesty, the fictional company in Scenario 3 is actually a real company, but out of respect, they will remain anonymous.)
Scenario 1: Facebook walks the line (and does it well)
The growing brand power and household name status behind Facebook is remarkable, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down yet. What began as a modest college-only social network, exploded when Facebook ultimately opened their doors to everyone.
Shortly after going public, Facebook opened up their developer platform and allowed developers to create custom applications that would live on third party servers yet still be accessible within Facebook’s site. The now-ubiquitous “Facebook Application” spawned an entire industry for web developers and marketers alike.
Shortly thereafter, the “year of mobile” finally arrived. The culture begun by the Blackberry (or Crackberry as their loyal users would say), finally exploded with the release of the iPhone. Basically, it didn’t take long for mobile to get “a whole lot cooler.”
Capitalizing on the growing trend, and recognizing a cultural revolution that found users interested in maintaining contact with friends and family at all times, Facebook launched a mobile site, a remote way to update a user’s status via SMS text messages, and ultimately, offered an official Facebook mobile application native to the iPhone and Blackberry.
Facebook recently opened their data up even further, empowering developers to create their own desktop clients, embeddable widgets, mobile applications and a number of other offerings where users could interact with Facebook.
The touch points where one can interact with Facebook are now almost too many to count, but it was the native mobile applications that unleashed the floodgates of developer interest. Today, Facebook counts that more than 30 million users are accessing their site though a mobile device and these mobile users are the service’s most hard-core users — 50% more active than their web-only counterparts.
Next Page: How Amazon stands out in e-commerce
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james…
good article chris.
I believe that APIs, when done correctly, with the proper support, vastly increase a companies value in the developer community, and through them the public in general.
A strategy that i find interesting is that some companies are limiting the API usage to particular vendors, in order to prevent over saturation of multiple applications that do the same thing.
Jason Grant…
There is a big fight going on at the moment for the ‘developer community’.
The Open Source scene has been hijacked by big corporations to harness the power of ‘cheap labour’ which feels like they are independent, while locking themselves into working with a particular API (i.e. Google Maps, Microsoft Search API, etc.).
What this leads to is a new form of a ‘corporate lock-in’ which most people (bizzarely) call ‘open web’ it cannot be further from the truth.
Ah well I could go on and on about this.
Chris F.…
Thanks for the input Jason! I’ve particularly noticed this trend in the past few months, which in part prompted me to write this article.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that corporations are “hijacking” the Open Source movement, since the nature of OS is to adapt it freely regardless of the end goal. However, there isn’t merit for a corporation to look to the community (”cheap labour”) as a means to accomplish their own internal goals. In the example of “Company-X,” I can already see that their goal hasn’t been met as I still haven’t seen any real-world deployments using their API.
My needs for a mobile site aren’t there. If they’re not creating it (and they haven’t, in this example), they’re leaving it to the developers to create it. Nobody has done it yet (and I really don’t have the time to do it myself), so I’m one of the many consumers that are left out in the cold.
Target and Walmart, on the other hand, have recognized the need to provide their consumers with a mobile version of their site, and I’ve used them often – even when I’m in their stores.
The key here is not relying on the development community to do the work that you should be doing. If there’s a demand for your consumers to have a mobile website, for example, then you should be developing it as an official offering — not looking to the development community to do it for you.
Jason Grant…
I agree.
There is much to be said about the entire API thing.
One of the main ‘thinking points’ I am rotating around these days is that the whole notion of an API can already be heavily implemented through things like URL structures and widgets and should be reusable in any context.
My ‘angle’ of comment was based on the idea that even though a specific URL is enough of an API, big corporations like Google create an API instead to ‘get developers bought’ into learning the API and developing with it.
Once that becomes a ‘trend’ companies start hearing about it, so they start buying into it and then the whole thing goes out of control until a bubble is reached.
In the process of reaching the bubble bursting point many corporations start thinking along the lines ‘if we don’t have an API we are going to be dead tomorrow’, etc. etc.
Same happened in Web1.0 bubble when ‘everyone had to be online or else’ and the same is happening now where ‘if you are not on Twitter your business is dead’ model is being taunted around.
APIs are just one of the big buzz words which we are going to look back on in time thinking ‘what was the fuss about’. The same thing as what will happen with Twitter.
Oh boy, I have really tried to cover every topic in one here!