Control Your Content with APIs

Step right up for a behind-the-scenes, all-access tour of the Internet. Today we’re headed down to the basement to peer at some of the plumbing that makes the behemoth possible. In a physical incarnation, this would resemble a massive tangle of pipes leading not just from your computer to the Web, but between sites as well.

These site-to-site pipes, called APIs, are the hidden elements powering the dynamic new tools that we have come to expect from Web 2.0. An API, or application programming interface, is a set of programming functions and standards for interacting with a Web tool. Facebook is a great example of how content can be developed and delivered through APIs. Every quiz, cupcake, pet, and other bit of virtual cuteness there employs a series of programming commands that comprise the Facebook API.

While there’s still a good deal of computer coding involved in writing a Facebook app, the API helps streamline the process by standardizing the ways in which a programmer interacts with Facebook’s code. For example, if you were building a Facebook app for your library, you might want to see if a user was a friend of your library page. To check that, you would apply the “pages.isFan” bit of code within the Facebook API. This will send a specific request to Facebook to check if the user is a fan and return a yes/no answer. If you are interested in learning more about APIs or Facebook programming, the Facebook developers’ site (developers.facebook.com) is actually very user-friendly for getting started.

But what if you just want to make use of APIs and aren’t comfortable coding things yourself? Not to worry: there are many others out there taking on the work of creating API-based tools and widgets that let you add connectivity and interactivity to your site. Recently, Google released a flurry of new widgets that use the Google API to let you embed Google tools anywhere online.

Google’s Web Elements lets you share calendars, comments, search results, maps, news, presentations, spreadsheets, and YouTube videos from within your Web site. Using the custom search element, you could easily add a box for searching a Google Custom Search Engine to any page on your library’s site. This would enable students to search within a defined set of Web resources on a single topic. Take, for example, a country search engine, which could limit results to certain sites such as the IMF, countryreports.org, and the CIA World Factbook. The results can be broken into tabs to further refine topics such as the country’s economy or geography. You can try this yourself at schoolof.info/countrysearch.

Web Elements truly put you in control of your content, while freeing you from having to generate all of it yourself. Add a news element, for example, to provide constantly updated headlines on a given topic such as “school library.” Meanwhile, the YouTube element imports video from a variety of international sources to complement the text stories. If your school is using Google Docs, you can present student slide shows, let’s say, on your library site using the presentations element. Feeling even more adventurous? Google provides additional code for its API so that more programming-savvy users can further customize any of these elements.

Whether you’re creating your own Facebook app or using Google’s new Web Elements to ramp up your site, it’s the humble collection of programming functions that comprise an API that makes all this cool stuff possible. This leads us to further questions, this time directed to the vendors that serve schools and libraries. Where are the APIs for our electronic resources? Where are the APIs to embed our catalogs? When will we be able to hook up the pipes to tap into a whole new level of information sharing?