This is my online domain where I work to understand the world of the Application Programming Interfaces, also known as APIs. This new way of sharing data using the web is touching almost every aspect of our increasingly digital lives, providing access to the bits and bytes that make our personal and professional worlds go round.

This is my research specifically how embeddable tooling is developed on top of APIs, allowing the publishing and syndication of buttons, badges, widgets, and other tooling around the web, in mobile applications, as well as directly on-device.

API Evangelist is a network of data driven projects and APIs which I curate and manage as part of this ongoing research, hoping to provide easy access to the moving parts of my work. Everything you see here runs on Github, making everything forkable, and reusable for both humans and machines.

I love what the folks over at USAFacts have done with their effort to educate everyone regarding how the US works (or doesn’t). I commend Steve Ballmer for the money he’s put into the project and the obviously huge amount of work they have put into making some pretty complex things understandable. However, I just have one critique: I wish they had an API, accompanied with a more sophisticated sharing and embeddable approach to publishing the wealth of valuable information contained within the site.

You can share links to specific sections of USAFacts, but it is just a generic image with a link to each area of the site. The site is exactly what we need in a Trump era, and is full of valuable factoids about how things work, but we need more eye candy for sharing, and the ability to share more granular level details about what is contained within the project. Journalists should be able to craft stories around finance and population via a graph, chart, or other detail that links back to the site. In the current state, you have to be pretty motivated and truly care about this stuff to visit the site and get involved–this represents a pretty light portion of the US population (maybe we could get a chart ;-).

All it would take to accomplish this is a pretty simple JSON API with some D3.js or other API visualization magic. With an API, data-savvy journalists, and other 3rd party developers could help carry the load when it comes to developing storytelling tooling that could help USAFacts make a bigger impact. Think about the impact that Facebook and Twitter cards had on the election when it came to sharing news (or fake news) with the public–we need USAFacts to be richly embedded in everyone’s timeline, with meaningful storytelling behind when a user is looking to know more. The facts have to be portable, shareable, visual, and tell a story–this is something an API excels at being an engine for.

I understand that USAFacts is just getting started, and maybe they are working on, but without any sort of road map, I have no way of knowing. If the folks behind the important project want to ensure the site lives on beyond the last wave of press releases they need to invest heavily in an API, as well as an embeddable and social sharing strategy that will help spread the valuable facts across the web where they need to be.

• Read The Blog

• Embed Engines
  • Widget Builder - A widget builder provides a form that API consumers can use to configure a predefined widget that is integrated with an API, allowing them to customize and tailor the widget experience.
  • JavaScript API - A complete JavaScript API that developers can use to build and manage their own JavaScript integrations with an APIs resources, beyond existing widgets.
• Embed Formats
  • Open Graph Protocol - The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph, by embedding of simple tags in the pages header that describe objects.
  • oEmbed - Format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource.
• Embeddable Tools
  • Widgets - Widgets are highly functional, API is driven​ JavaScript tools that provide portable applications that can be embedded on any website or application.
  • Buttons - Buttons are shareable snippets of code that often share, syndicate or trigger a variety of events that use APIs as their source.
  • Badges - Badges are common for displaying content and resources delivered via an API and allow these assets to be embedded on any website or application.
  • Bookmarklet - A bookmarklet that can be added to the toolbar of a browser, and quickly push data to an API.
  • Login Button - Providing a single click button for logging into system.
  • Intents - providing the ability to easily make a single, or orchestrate several API calls -- fulfilling a single intent.
• Overview
  • Language Support - Providing support for multiple languages across embeddable elements.
  • CSS Control - Providing support over CSS elements for embeddable elements.
  • Analytics - Providing analytics as part of the embeddable tooling operations.

These building blocks are constantly being added to and reorganized. If there is something you think should be here feel free to let me know. Remember that this represents my living research, and will evolve, expand and actually seed new research areas as I find the time to pay attention to API testing.

As I keep an eye on the space I curate news, bookmark organizations, watch interesting tools, and work to understand what deployment solutions are being applied by leading API providers. I take everything I find and publish here as part of my research.

I then take this research, and what I've learned and publish stories on the blog, and more long form content like my industry guides, and white papers for customers. This is one way that I generate revenue to keep it all going.

If you'd like to see me focus more on API embeddables I could use more partners investing in this area, helping me find the time to study more about what is going on. Feel free to contact me directly if you want to talk more about API embeddables.

Thanks for your support!