We do a lot of searching for new APIs here at Streamdata.io. We are looking for interesting APIs to put into our API Gallery and to help us potentially generate more leads for streaming API customers. One of the challenges we’ve encountered along the way is that not all API providers are ready for event-driven architecture as we offer, and are not as far along in their journey. This is fine, we usually end up helping these customers by providing them with a variety of consulting services to help them along their way, but when we want to find more mature APIs we tend to search for APIs that already have webhooks.
It is easy to perform Google or Github searches for product data APIs, or maybe market data APIS, but when you add the word “webhook” to the search, the APIs you get back will be much more mature, and further along in their API journey than many of the other APIs you will come across. Newer APIs just haven’t reached the adoption, the number of users, and volume of data flowing through their API pipes to have realized the need for more event-driven, and real-time infrastructure. Few APIs launch with webhook infrastructure on day one and this type of investment usually coming further along in the API journey. Making webhooks an interesting way to filter API searches based upon the maturity of the API, and excluding newer API providers.
As the number of APIs available across the landscape increases, we are all going to need to get more refined in how we search and discover the API resources we need to get the job done. We are always looking for ways in which we can help our customers more efficiently find the resources they are looking for, identifying ways to fine tune the signals being put out by leading API providers. While some newer APIs might still be work looking at, and playing with, when it comes to the overall value of the resources being provided, and the reliability and stability of the API when it comes to integration, you usually want providers who are further along in their journey. We are just looking to aggregate, and index all of the signals you need to refine your API search as part of our work on the Streamdata.io API Gallery.
API discovery for many companies is still a manual thing, leveraging Google and Github to find what they are looking for. We still do a lot of manual refinement as part of our API discovery process, but we are increasingly automating our efforts using the Bing Search API and the Github API, and webhooks is part of the vocabulary we are developing to help refine the automation of our API discovery. Here at Streamdata.io, we work to discover and profile all APIs we are coming across, and are developing a rich set of flags for APIs who have begun investing in their event-driven API infrastructure and working hard to bring this out in our upcoming release of the Streamdata.io API Gallery search. Allowing gallery users to take advantage of a more refined, and precise way of finding the APIs they are looking for as part of their business operations–stay tuned, for the next generation of API discovery coming to a Github repo near you!
