Marketing Scoops: The X API Costs Developers $42K Per Month. Now X Wants a Cut Of Their Revenue Instead

Jennifer Brückner/picture alliance via Getty Images

Third-party developers currently pay Elon Musk’s X as much as millions of dollars per year to in order to access the platform’s API. However, it appears that Musk and company now want a cut of those developers’ revenue instead. X is now planning to change their API pricing scheme to a revenue share model…….Continue reading….

By Matt Binder

Source: Mashable

Critics:

An API opens a software system to interactions from the outside. It allows two software systems to communicate across a boundary — an interface — using mutually agreed-upon signals. In other words, an API connects software entities together. Unlike a user interface, an API is typically not visible to users. It is an “under the hood” portion of a software system, used for machine-to-machine communication.

A well-designed API exposes only objects or actions needed by software or software developers. It hides details that have no use. This abstraction simplifies programming. Building software using APIs has been compared to using building-block toys, such as Lego bricks. Software services or software libraries are analogous to the bricks; they may be joined together via their APIs, composing a new software product. The process of joining is called integration.

As an example, consider a weather sensor that offers an API. When a certain message is transmitted to the sensor, it will detect the current weather conditions and reply with a weather report. The message that activates the sensor is an API call, and the weather report is an API response. A weather forecasting app might integrate with a number of weather sensor APIs, gathering weather data from throughout a geographical area.

An API is often compared to a contract. It represents an agreement between parties: a service provider who offers the API and the software developers who rely upon it. If the API remains stable, or if it changes only in predictable ways, developers’ confidence in the API will increase. This may increase their use of the API. An API can specify the interface between an application and the operating system. POSIX, for example, specifies a set of common APIs that aim to enable an application written for a POSIX conformant operating system to be compiled for another POSIX conformant operating system.

Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution are examples of operating systems that implement the POSIX APIs. Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to a backward-compatible API, particularly within its Windows API (Win32) library, so older applications may run on newer versions of Windows using an executable-specific setting called “Compatibility Mode”. An API differs from an application binary interface (ABI) in that an API is source code based while an ABI is binary based. For instance, POSIX provides APIs while the Linux Standard Base provides an ABI.

Remote APIs allow developers to manipulate remote resources through protocols, specific standards for communication that allow different technologies to work together, regardless of language or platform. For example, the Java Database Connectivity API allows developers to query many different types of databases with the same set of functions, while the Java remote method invocation API uses the Java Remote Method Protocol to allow invocation of functions that operate remotely, but appear local to the developer.

Therefore, remote APIs are useful in maintaining the object abstraction in object-oriented programming; a method call, executed locally on a proxy object, invokes the corresponding method on the remote object, using the remoting protocol, and acquires the result to be used locally as a return value. A modification of the proxy object will also result in a corresponding modification of the remote object.^[The design of an API has significant impact on its usage.

The principle of information hiding describes the role of programming interfaces as enabling modular programming by hiding the implementation details of the modules so that users of modules need not understand the complexities inside the modules. Thus, the design of an API attempts to provide only the tools a user would expect. The design of programming interfaces represents an important part of software architecture, the organization of a complex piece of software.

API documentation describes what services an API offers and how to use those services, aiming to cover everything a client would need to know for practical purposes. Documentation is crucial for the development and maintenance of applications using the API. API documentation is traditionally found in documentation files but can also be found in social media such as blogs, forums, and Q&A websites. Traditional documentation files are often presented via a documentation system, such as Javadoc or Pydoc, that has a consistent appearance and structure.

However, the types of content included in the documentation differs from API to API. In the interest of clarity, API documentation may include a description of classes and methods in the API as well as “typical usage scenarios, code snippets, design rationales, performance discussions, and contracts”, but implementation details of the API services themselves are usually omitted. It can take a number of forms, including instructional documents, tutorials, and reference works. It’ll also include a variety of information types, including guides and functionalities.

Restrictions and limitations on how the API can be used are also covered by the documentation. For instance, documentation for an API function could note that its parameters cannot be null, that the function itself is not thread safe. Because API documentation tends to be comprehensive, it is a challenge for writers to keep the documentation updated and for users to read it carefully, potentially yielding bugs. API documentation can be enriched with metadata information like Java annotations.

This metadata can be used by the compiler, tools, and by the run-time environment to implement custom behaviors or custom handling. It is possible to generate API documentation in a data-driven manner. By observing many programs that use a given API, it is possible to infer the typical usages, as well the required contracts and directives. Then, templates can be used to generate natural language from the mined data.

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