Sharing Data: Becoming A Walk in the Park (API’s, RSS, Microformats)
One of my favorite web design blogs is ThinkVitamin and the headlining article is “Back to the Future of the Web”. It is a easy read where they asked 16 top web designers this question…
What’s one thing about today’s web (company, technology, movement, etc.) that you think we’ll look back on in 10 years and say ‘that was important’ or ‘that was really a turning point in the history of the web’?
All the answers make sense. From moving desktop apps to the web, to YouTube, to Mobile devices, but the one that stands out to me is data exchange with API’s, RSS Feeds, and micro-formats.
Now I know that all these technologies are nothing completely new. This has to do with the popularity and bigger companies seeing the value in providing easy ways to exchange their data.
Here are examples of companies that are using these technologies to make their content more readily available.
Amazon - API
API stands for Application Interface. Amazon provides read access to it’s data programatically so you can use it on your own application.
CNN and RSS Feeds
RSS is a way for users to subscribe to your data, like a news feed and works similar to how a news letter works, but is a automated method for the host. CNN has many different feeds available on cnn.com.
eBay - Microformats
Microformats allow content publishers to describe there content inside the HTML. It is a standardized way to define what is a address, what is a email, what is a phone number, what is a date and many other types of data. eBay is defining in their code content such as a buyer and seller address details, auction end date/times, feedback and recent purchases/won/lost/watching. This data is easy
There are so many others that I can list, but wanted to show a example of each. Google has a bunch, like it’s Maps API and access to a bunch of it’s other services.
Post any questions about data exchange in the comments and I will do what I can to answer them.