I love twitter. Not the website, or the company, but the concept. Twitter at its technical heart is a database with an API (application programming interface) sitting on top of it. This is my version of bliss. When Twitter-based apps sprung up like weeds, I was in heaven.
Oh, I get the cultural implications of using twitter. I’m tied in and connected with people I have no other way of connecting with. I feed all my interests and have made some new friends.
But back to the techy stuff. A significant part of my career has been working with applications and their underlying APIs. Fifteen years ago, these applications were platform dependent. My main focus was the API, the rest of the application was just the racked blond on the corner.
There was no concept of platform-agnostic APIs or applications. You could port a codebase between platforms but more work was generally needed to make the program run (or even compile, but that’s beside the point) . Many projects of this type died in conversion hell. Then the web came along where a browser could be on a different platform from the server. Oh, what a thought.
Now that the browser (the application) and the database (the server) where on different machines, how to exploit that? Create a service running on the web server so that a browser could make requests through a standard set of calls (the API), aka Web Services. This idea was called a lot of different things but the possibilities were endless. All the marketing guys scratched their heads.
‘How do we sell an API?’
‘Don’t know.’
The examples used to demonstrate Web Services were calculators or other math-based ideas. But the processing power a web server provided wasn’t the key to solidifying the idea. Once a company had a unique content set (the database) that people wanted, people started seeing the potential. Slowly along came some interesting web services: Google Maps, Amazon Books, Amazon S3. These services were geared toward businesses, not consumers. The platform-independent technology needed something that could grab the consumer’s attention, in order to grab the marketing guys’ attention. Something people just couldn’t ignore.
And then there was Twitter.
I’d never thought of any code as a “racked blonde in the corner.” A unique metaphor and a curious (if slightly distracting) mental image…
I’m really hopeful that the Twitter client explosion is opening developers’ eyes to the possibilities. There are so many Web services that would benefit from a marketplace of rich client applications… and likewise many Web applications that could see a similar rich-client marketplace open up if they were to offer a full-featured API.
(Now that I think about it, maybe it’s already happening more than I realized. It’s surprising, really, how many native apps that rely entirely on Web service APIs I use on a daily basis. Darkslide (for Flickr), Byline (for Google Reader), Mailplane (for Gmail), Reportage and Birdhouse (for Twitter).)