Do you provide an API?

Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 11:31am Monday 01 March 2010

Every website wants to have the highest number of visitors, and unfortunately this will either cost you lots of money or take you a considerable amount of time building a community. One of the ways you can build a traffic referral network and engage with your community is by providing an API.

Previously we talked about what is an API last year. An API is a software-to-software interface - NOT a user interface. With APIs, applications talk to each other without any user knowledge or intervention. Job boards, recruitment databases, payment providers & social networking sites all use some sort of API to communicate with each other. With APIs, the calls back and forth between applications are managed through a web service.

Most job boards use some sort of API/Web Service to allow bulk job postings on the back end, but fail to provide any sort of front end service. Just think of the ways developers can mash up, aggregate or repurpose jobs data and provide referral traffic.

If you want to see a good example of a job board API, have a look at Authentic Jobs who provide an open API. If you have any other examples of public API's please let me know.