This means Application Programming Interface, by the way. That may not help much, though. Even so, most surely you’re already using them every single day… Let me just mention you a few ways APIs involved in your daily activities: Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Foursquare, Instagram, Pandora and even WhatsApp. Don’t tell me you don’t use any of these. There are widgets, buttons and badges everywhere making you pull and push content to other sites.
You might want to think of APIs as a wall socket. These electrical sockets are essentially interfaces to a service. You’re a consumer of this service. You don’t need to have your very own power source for you to be able to charge your electrical devices.
Now, back to reality, you use APIs as an interface to some other application/website service. You’re a user of this application/site. It’s through this API (make it widget, button, badge or whatever), that you don’t need to use the application/website as a whole, but only a small part for which the API was specifically made for.
There are even more detailed ways of having an API. A few examples: thermostats, smoke detectors, automobiles, clothing, glasses, etc.
And it’s logical. I mean, if you want as many people as possible to use your product/service, why wouldn’t it be a magnificent idea to split your product/service into tiny, functional, very specific parts (APIs) that can be implemented through other applications/websites or whatever; your users won’t have to be moving from one place to another to do as they desire. And that’s very, VERY important :)
And it’s logical. I mean, if you want as many people as possible to use your product/service, why wouldn’t it be a magnificent idea to split your product/service into tiny, functional, very specific parts (APIs) that can be implemented through other applications/websites or whatever; your users won’t have to be moving from one place to another to do as they desire. And that’s very, VERY important :)
Here I leave a video showing IFTTT (one of many API enabled orchestration platforms), a service that takes approach of many, many APIs out there and lets you combine them in practically infinite ways do pretty much anything you want. Specifically, a video showing what 2 guys can accomplish in just one day of playing around with APIs. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading my blog, you're an awesome person.
If you want to read further, these were my sources:
http://www.programmableweb.com/news/what-is-an-api/analysis/2015/12/03#apiu#What Are APIs and How Do They Work?
http://101.apievangelist.com/