Social Mention: API monitoring for social sentiment and alerts »

Warning: don't try Social Mention unless you have 20 minutes - it's addicting.

Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. 

It analyzes content on terms like apigee (score to the left) or Sam Ramji (screenshot below) and gives you alerts, feeds data and a sentiment scorecard. 

Think Google Alerts but for social media.

Jon, who built Social Mention, uses Apigee to monitor their social media API. We asked him for his insights and experience using Apigee (see below).

What insights into your app or other benefits have you gotten from working with Apigee?

Jon: I would say the best insight is general API usage and error rates.It's great to be able to track usage on an hourly basis and throttle accordingly.

What new Apigee feature would you most like to see from Apigee?

Jon:The ability to track individual users/developers of the api via query string key would be fantastic. Currently, there is no method to tell how many calls each api developer is making.

What mashup, app, or API do you admire?

Jon: I would have to say Twitter's API - it's simple, to the point and it works great. They also don't have restrictive usage policies or rate limit.

We're working hard to get per developer quota enforcement in soon for Jon and the rest of Apigee users that have been asking for this feature on our feedback forum.

Check it out!

Birdwatching on Facebook: Eyeing API response and error rates for a social app »

We spotted a great Facebook app in the wild.

Bird.im's Facebook app - apps.facebook.com/birdwatching - brings birdwatchers together to share and discuss their latest finds. 

This is a very well designed and full featured app - enabling sharing of bird photos, locations, discussions and connecting passionate enthusiasts with similar interests.   The Facebook platform at it's best.

The Birdwatching Facebook app provides an API for Facebook to consume when the user performs 'one-click' AJAX actions such as adding a bird, a country, or a photo for a spotting.  This streamlines entry creation by offering an alternative over a simple form and directly improves user engagement as users create and share more entries.   In the future, an iPhone app that enables entries from the field will also consume this API.

Hugo and the bird.im team (@birdim) use Apigee to measure API response rates and errors.  (see how Apigee calculates API response rates and API error rates in previous entries).

Thanks to Hugo for all the great feedback on our Apigee Feedback forum!

How is cloud computing related to SOA?  Case study on API Policy and Governance Patterns »

Last week, Scott Metzger of Truecredit.com gave a great case study presentation on how they opened their internal SOA as APIs for partners at the Burton Group Catalyst conference.  Specifically, the different policy and governance patterns.

Scott talks about the factors driving them to identify and implement a separate application agnostic layer for 5 major policy patterns including service access, routing, caching, transformations, and operations. (And more details of their implementation in this video)

Scott Metzger of TrueCredit Catalyst Presentation

Case Study: SaaS API Governance and Management »

Last week, Tim Madewell of Innotas gave a great case study presentation on SaaS API Governance and Management at the Burton Group Catalyst conference.

The key point:  If you provide or use a SaaS API, you have to make sure your SaaS API has the same level of governance as on-premise alternatives.  And if you can nail this - you might have a significant competitive advantage over both your on-premise and SaaS competitors in your vertical.

Tim talks about the evolution of their API becoming an critical part of the service, the importance of governance, and how they operationalized their API.   

TrueCredit.com API case study »

Scott Metzger, CTO of TrueCredit.com was kind enough to take some time to talk about their Consumer Connect API program and some of the technical challenges that they have addressed using Apigee's API Gateway.

Scott wanted to make life easier on his development team as they ramped up their number of APIs, partners and traffic volumes.  Here, he describes how he uses the technology as a 'policy layer' to provide API analytics, fine-grained data protection, and caching in an API Gateway. In this case, Apigee Enterprise is deployed on-premise virtualized software.

We're very excited to be working with Scott and TrueCredit, and check out the full TrueCredit Case study. 

SaaS API management and operations »

This week we'll be at the O'Reilly Velocity conference on scalability and operations in San Jose.   On the topic of API operations, below is a case study we did with Tim Madewell of Innotas, providers of on-demand IT Governance -  where he talks about how they operationalize and scale their SaaS API.

Tim talks about the importance of having separation and visibility between front-end and back-end service traffic.  We are seeing this use case more often as more web products are being built off the same API that is opened to customers and partners.  Because your web app is the biggest customer of the API, it's critical to be able to understand and throttle traffic into the back-end to make sure your web app performance isn't compromised by API usage by other clients. 

From a competitive standpoint, Tim makes a great point that it's critical to be able to assure enterprise customers that a SaaS API is as robust as anything their customer could build or buy on-premise - not only from a functional standpoint, but operationally in terms of security, compliance, control and scale.   

For more on this, Dana Gardner did a great podcast on Innotas API management at briefingsdirect.com