That’s a mouthful, eh? Application programming interfaces, or API’s, essentially allow a user to code a program that uses resources from another program or in conjunction with it. More commonly in recent web trends, an API allows things like the applications on Facebook. For example, someone might write a program that sits on your desktop or in your taskbar that would notify you of comments being posted to your page or if you’ve received a message to your inbox.
API’s are all over the place and you’re most likely using one. Why am I talking about API’s? Because there are some websites that either don’t have them in place, they’re not easily accessable, or they’re handicapped in performance and don’t allow you to do much. Facebook’s API is wonderful. You can very easily, with little programming knowledge at all, create a very simple application.
MySpace on the other hand, I’m not so sure of. Google developed something called opensocial, which MySpace jumped on board for. Typically anything Google touches turns to gold and I’m a huge fan of the company – hell, they turned a search box into one of the biggest companies on the internet. (Yes, I’m using the term search box and of course know that’s a bit of an understatement.)
I haven’t taken the time to delve into the API much yet, and I’m a little concerned about doing so. While the idea is good, opensocial is, as the name might imply, very open. And the more open you are on the internet, the more vulnerable you are. One of the first sites to use opensocial was cracked within 20 minutes of going live with the API and allowed attackers to view private information. I would have prefered that MySpace had developed it’s own API with a bit more limits. Had they done so, I would have liked to have seen the following features.
*Pulling content from blog posts.
*Pulling content from bulletin posts, in a similar fashion.
*Pulling content from events and calendars.
*Providing a means to pull albums and specific pictures from a users profile.
These are very basic requests and would only be allowed on public profiles. Why would this work well? Because beyond the standard users of MySpace, there is a large amount of musician, comedian, commercial, and soon celebrity profiles. While I could care less about most of these, a solid API would simplify things for smaller bands on the web.
I’m currently doing the coding for a website for a local band in my area. If I had access to these tools, they could post news/events/photos on their MySpace page and have them appear on their website. They’re still allowed a professional web prescense of their own while being able to keep their fans & friends on MySpace updated at all times and able to communicate with them via that platform.
Anyways – I don’t know. I felt it was time for a good rant, but it’s becoming obvious I’m out of practice as my hands are starting to cramp up and this has been an unbelievably nerdy post of no worth. Until next time.
