This Week in APIs- October 9-15 »

"Are you there, endpoint? It's me, POST request." Check out what you missed this week in API action.

Great dive into the new Facebook Groups API by Josh Constine over at InsideFacebook. Learn about how it works, what you can do with it and if you're ready to start playing.

Best Buy announced that its API will now allow customers to make transactions on 3rd party apps or pages- no more routing to the Best Buy site for purchase. For retailers, allowing customers to view and purchase merchandise in the same place is a best practice. Great move.

Our own Mike Debnar has an article out in the E-Commerce Times called "The Rebirth of E-Commerce in the New Internet," a look at how retailers can innovate using APIs to reach the mobile, multichannel and app-driven web. Includes three rules for doing APIs right!

Hot New APIs and Developer Candy

• YouTube has added PubSubHubBub to its activities feed, making it possible to have video data pushed to your apps- no more polling! ProgrammableWeb's got the scoop on how you can get to real-time with your video apps.
• SimpleNote's got a new API in private testing that you can sign up for here. SimpleNote provides an easy way to keep things like lists, notes and instructions.
• The Next Web loops us in on a fun new API from Wibiya, a site that provides websites with toolsbars for social and sharing. They are on the hunt for some innovation!

What'd we miss? Shoot us a note on Twitter. And if you love APIs, remember to get your free "I <3 API" stickers.

Retail APIs and Garden Hoses: Making Things Grow in the Enterprise »

APIs are like a garden hose. They can make things grow.

Well that's what I was thinking as I tried to save my roses from the blistering summer heat here in Dallas, Texas. It really started to make sense when I snapped off my trigger nozzle in favor of a sprinkler. I have the quick connect system so it's a piece of cake to swap out attachments. The 104 degree heat was getting to me, and I started to imagine the hose being connected to retail information and inventory - the API being the quick connect and the nozzles being the interface to consumers.

I'm sitting on the patio at this point, the sprinklers doing the work now, and I'm thinking I should grab a beer and really see where this analogy goes. I watch the sprinkler go back and forth, spraying a pattern of precious water across the lawn - and on my FENCE!

No, the source of life cannot be wasted on a board-on-board fence. I get up and carefully plan my assault on the sprinkler, careful not to get wet (note to self: cold water pelting your body when its 104 is not something you should avoid). The sprinkler has all kinds of adjustment mechanisms. I can adjust the spray pattern left or right, long or short. I can control the amount of water going through the valve and of course there's a timer.

Ahhhhh, this like API infrastructure, the control panel for APIs. Crystal clear. Just like the mechanisms of the garden hose nozzle let your control and target different areas of your lawn, API infrastructure lets you optimize your API for various sections of the market - from mobile developers to affiliate marketers. And just like a great sprinkler system, an API infrastructure lets you scale up to cover your whole "lawn." Finally, API infrastructure provides visibility, letting you see where your services are going and how they are being used.

At its core, an API infrastructure lets you harness and control the power of an API and grow your market, just like a garden hose lets you harness the power of water to grow your lawn.

So you know what I did? The next time I went to talk to a prospect I carried a garden hose, quick connect and sprinkler with me (at least they will remember me).

Analogy complete. No!

One more beer (my answer to Job's "One more thing").

API.... A Profit Interface. Another entry on that soon.

This week in APIs- June 14-18 »

Here's the best of what happened this week in APIs!

Opera 10.6 Beta- The Opera 10.6 beta was announced- the new version implements W3C's Geolocation API. Is this a sign that the browser is moving away from plug-ins and into APIs for more functionality? Either way, we expect a lot more browser innovation with APIs.

Retail APIs- Over at InfoWorld, Neil McAllister wrote up a big new opportunity for retail: open APIs. Neil illustrates how companies like Amazon, Zappos, Tesco and Sears are opening up their APIs to reach customers in the new multi-device, multi-channel world. Big theme- the new emerging role of developers who can build APIs right. 

Twitter OAuth Switchover- The Twitter API team announced that they are moving back the date of the "OAuth switchover"- when they will no longer support basic auth. On August 16th Twitter will be ramping down rate limits on basic auth by about 10 calls/hour/day, ending on August 31 when basic auth won't be accepted.

New APIs- Every week there are new APIs! Here's what we're excited about right now:

• Plancast- a service for sharing future plans with your social network- announced an open read/write API. The world of social planning is heating up- and APIs are a critical part of the movement. 
• The State of California introduced 10 new APIs on their http://data.ca.gov/ site; including ones to get hospital locations, draw household and county population data, and find EDD office locations. Great signs that California is not only getting Gov 2.0, but also geolocation. We also like the clean way they lay out data sets- best practice for government agencies. 
• Infochimps- a data marketplace- just opened up an API which offers access to its Twitter and U.S. Census datasets. Lots of great information to build apps with and check out their business model- pricing to the API is tiered based on number of API calls per month- what do you think? 

Any major API news we missed? Leave a comment or tweet at us- http://www.twitter.com/apigee 

Location, Location, Location: Retail APIs in the Post-Browser World »

Since the beginning of retail, store location has been a key ingredient for success. Forward-thinking retailers are now considering ‘location’ online as consumers move beyond the browser, increasingly spending time on their mobile phones, iPads, game consoles and other devices.

Last week Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article on “Retailers Ring Up New Sales on Smartphones” on highlighting the significance of a mobile strategy to the new world of retail. Hal Lawton, president of homedepot.com, expects 30-40% of their traffic to come from mobile devices by 2014. Retailers like HomeDepot are going to where their customers are by executing multi-device strategies.

But how can a retailer get onto all these devices, and to all the other places online where their customers are spending time? As depicted below, APIs are the center of a multi-device, multi-channel strategy:

And additionally, APIs are how online retailing is moving from a direct to an indirect model via new applications from partners and 3rd party developers. Here is a diagram illustrating the new retail chain: 

But it's not all easy- each of these channels poses unique technical challenges. But it's worth it: for less than the cost of a single new brick-and-mortar location, you can use APIs to be everywhere your customers are.