

What is an API, can we redefine? - mgwhitfield

a company said, &quot;you can&#x27;t mess with our services directly, but we&#x27;ll give you a way to interact with our services and (mostly) data over HTTP.  basically, SOAP is terrible, and this is just like HTTP but we give you a structured response in JSON.&quot;<p>and then technical strategy said, &quot;yes, and we can dissuade people competing with us by getting them excited to use the data.&quot;<p>then the marketing team said, &quot;we can really improve ROI if we siphon out user data to improve our business intelligence.&quot;<p>and then the user lost, competition squandered, app developers won, big biz wins.  am i getting this right?  is this what an API is?<p>can we think of a better name?  i really don&#x27;t want to build an API if this is what this is.  right now i&#x27;ve just got, &quot;structured HTTP query&quot;.
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johns
the API is just the delivery mechanism. you can call it whatever you want.
platform is a popular choice. just make sure that both you and the consumers
benefit from every API call: [http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/03/12/apis-are-
dead-long-live-...](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/03/12/apis-are-dead-long-
live-apis/)

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davidsmith8900
\- Does this ~>
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_inter...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface)
by any chance help?

