Twitter, Foursquare, and the Interface API Strategy
This post is prompted by Gowalla’s recent announcement of a read-only API.
Twitter users often describe the service as “Facebook status updates by itself, without the other stuff”. This description is my favorite way to talk about the strategy behind Twitter’s design and their API, and what this strategy means for other startups charting a similar course.
Here’s my short version of the Interface API Strategy to World Domination:
Phase 1: Build a service around a single UI interaction (“What are you doing?”) and some basic but useful infrastructure (followers)
Phase 2: Leverage the simple API to spur the development of clients across all platforms and new value for users
Phase 3: Become the Internet Standard for your interaction and the resulting data
Phase 4: Profit.
It’s way more fun than collecting underpants. By optimizing for a simple API focused on on user interaction, you get a hoard of hackers, hobbyists, and entrepreneurs who want to play in this arena fighting by your side, as well as the possibility that the progressive executive in that old media company will understand, without a 30 minute presentation, the kick-ass opportunities your service offers. Twitter is already well on their way to becoming a standard interface on the web; I think they have small form distribution in the bag.
But now, we shall look into the (near) Future! The next interface API victory story will be a location check-in service. A once exciting web service cage match between newcomers Foursquare and Gowalla is proving to be something of a rout, with the scrappy and lean Foursquare announcing a new Old Media partnership every couple days or so, while Gowalla, laden down with a lot of new cash, fails to respond with a proper API.
Foursquare’s API, a huge driver of the service’s success, has all the characteristics of a winning design: their database structure is easy to understand, especially if you’ve used the service even once, and they allow full read/write access to almost every object. Gowalla’s object structure is similarly straightforward, so they have the cash and the position to compete, but until they open up write access, we only have one location check-in interface API in the ring.
Check-ins: check. What’s the next simple interface API?
