BBVA API Market
The open APIs sector is very much used to participating in debates, giving its opinion and working collaboratively. So it’s easy to find listings or valuable suggestions for all tastes.
In fact, beyond APIs from giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Telegram or Twitter, BBVA’s financial APIs or the IBM‘s predictive APIs, the search for the freshest and most enjoyable ones is a constant trend collected by sites such as:
The website specializing in APIs and one of the most popular for finding links between them published a list a long time ago that continues to spread like wildfire. It mainly focuses on some especially entertaining ones with a varied nature:
–With the focus on image. As an example, Portrait 3D API: providing software developers with a technology for creating animated facial models based on photos.
–With the focus on entertainment. Such as Trivia API, an API that provides access to thousands of questions and constantly feeds back; or such as Word Cloud Maker API, which generates word clouds from text blocks.
–With the focus on puns and strange languages. Such as EgyptoName API, that translates your name and creates an image using Egyptian hieroglyphs; Yoda Speak API, turning your sentences into Yoda language; or l33t sp34k API, that allows you to sound like a hacker.
Meanwhile, Quora, the site focusing on questions and answers, also has a thread about fun APIs. The good thing about this space is that in this case it is the users/participants themselves who answer and give their opinion on them.
For example, Benjo Libor, a developer from Berlin, gives his list of APIs as diverse as Love calculator, with which adding your name and your partner’s the API dictates the degree of compatibility of your love; or Crime Data, which allows you to obtain data from more recent and historical crimes so that everyone can feel safe in your neighborhood.
Along the same lines we find threads in Reddit, the social bookmarking and news aggregator website where it is the users who leave links. They can also vote for or against the other comments.
Thus, in one of them, dedicated precisely to cool APIs, we find some of the most widely used such as YouTube, Spotify or Soundcloud with comments with their strengths and weaknesses, but also more original ones such as:
–Star Wars API: first quantized and programmatically accessible data source on the Star Wars universe.
–Marvel Comics API: allows developers worldwide access to information about the extensive library of Marvel comics.
This offers one of the most elaborate proposals on this subject and even dedicates a series of articles to it. The first describes the coolest APIs as the secret weapons that are behind the most successful companies of the moment: Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, NEST, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and many more.
The series takes a journey through the sectors that are getting the most out of it: Internet of Things, airlines, banking, cosmetics and entertainment. All through a thorough analysis with examples or case studies such as the APIs used by L’Oreal, the NBA, SITA or others.
Finally, Ask metafilter also has an entry with some very interesting names. Including the Twilio API – making it possible to add telephony features to our applications or websites -, but also others.
An example? Sunlight Foundation’s APIs, that make it possible to query data in near real time on official events on Capitol Hill, including bills, votes and legislators.
Are you interested in financial APIs? Discover all the APIs we can offer you at BBVA
Taking a customer through the entire buying process until it is formalized is an arduous journey and one that faces the constant possibility of the customer leaving. However, there are ways to make the buying decision happen if you are given facilities such as agile, secure financing.
In a connected world, APIs are the glue that keeps all the parts that form our day-to-day lives in place. The same way the power of glue depends on the material it is used on and the knowledge of its properties, APIs are only as useful as their documentation allows for.
There are different solutions to monitor the performance of an API, in terms of traffic, quality and speed of the answers it provides. Detecting faults in the code or quantifying the generated revenues are also some of the options offered by these useful tools.
