As we work through the hundreds of APIs available in the Streamdata.io API Gallery, benchmarking them for StreamRank, we are coming across different variations in how APIs operate, and we are making changes to how we report upon their rate of change. Many APIs have a clear StreamRank, meaning that when polled each minute, the data changes regularly, reflecting the scope of resources that an API makes available. However, other APIs have the potential for a high StreamRank, and would potentially change more frequently with access to the right account, user, or organizations–the scope is just limited and isn’t platform-wide. An easy example of this could be Twitter. Depending on the account you are following, the StreamRank is going to be different. However, there are also APIs for the Twitter platform that widen the scope beyond a single user and provide access to high volumes of data. Other more specific examples would be documented storage APIs like Dropbox and Box, who do not provide platform-wide access to data and will be completely dependent on the activity of a particular organization, user, or group. Some will be highly active, while others won’t be as active, requiring a more variable StreamRank, as there are APIs that still have high volume potential, with the right scenario.
Our StreamRank has historically been a percentage, calculated based on changes in API requests over a 24-48 hour period. Moving forward we are adding the ability to give some API paths a variable = V StreamRank which will still considered to be high, or have the potential to be high depending on the situation. We don’t want these APIs to be left behind as we work to highlight APIs that have a high StreamRank, so we wanted to expand the notion of what is StreamRank to include them. We feel it will open the door to different types of exploration and experimentation with APIs we publish to the Streamdata.io API Gallery, as well as to potentially other ways of ranking APIs. Who knows, maybe we’ll establish other letters to reflect other StreamRank variations, with V (Variable) just being the first entry.
Our objective with StreamRank is to allow for the filtering of APIs by just the ones that have a high rate of flow, allowing API consumers to find APIs that provide access to rich streams of data. It is also allowing us to generate potential leads for APIs we think should be using our products and services. However, along the way, we are learning a lot, and hopefully providing some new and interesting ways to catalog APIs, and make them more discoverable by an organization, topic, as well as how often they change. Painting a picture of the API landscape that isn’t just about finding APIs by keyword or provider, but also discovering API resources based upon the occurrence of meaningful events, and the volume, or flow of data present on a platform, or for a specific user or group. Reflecting the changes we are seeing in the API landscape when it comes to providing and consuming APIs, as the event-driven world of APIs continues to expand.
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