There are many ways you, my reader, could’ve found your way to this article – our website, web search, RSS reader, Technorati, or perhaps a caring friend. One of my favorites…Twitter.

The past couple of years have seen an expanding growth in the publication, expansion, and adoption of APIs. You might be thinking, I don’t know what an API is; how can it help me and/or my business? That’s completely normal. If you keep reading, I promise that feeling will subside.

An API is one of those great technical acronyms (like HTTP, AJAX, or laser – that’s right, laser’s an acronym!) whose definition doesn’t really help clarify its meaning. An API – or Application Programmer Interface – is a means through which developers can access, create, or modify data outside of their development environment. Okay, I’ll admit even the description sounds only slightly more helpful than the definition – so let’s put it into context.

As a developer, I don’t have direct access to Twitter’s internal information, their development infrastructure, or database. Through their API, Twitter allows a developer like me to access certain aspects of their infrastructure through a secure, controlled environment outside of the Twitter site. I could write code to tweet or read tweets from our website!

Recently, we took that concept a step further. Integrated into the instance of Common Goal WebManager running Silverscape.com is an architecture giving WebManager’s blog authoring application the power to automatically tweet a link to our newest article when published! With one click, an article can be published to our website, Twitter, and countless other places picking up syndicated content like Technorati, Facebook, and RSS dashboards like Google Reader. One click: thousands…millions of potential readers.

What’s that? Twitter only posts 140 characters at a time?! You’re right; and URLs can get pretty long. This is where some API synergy comes into play. Our blog infrastructure is also tied into Bit.ly, a URL-shortening site that has – you guessed it – an API. Integrating with this system, WebManager utilizes bit.ly’s services to shorten our blog’s URLs before tweeting them.

And it’s not just Twitter riding the API train; hundreds of websites and services are available for us to use as tools to improve user website experience. You want a map on your “About Us” page showing the locations of all your stores? There’s an API for that (Google Maps). You want to pull in pictures you’ve taken over the years of all your best corporate events? There’s an API for that (Flickr). How about some video (YouTube)? You want to show some Flickr pictures and nearby restaurant reviews (Yelp) based on the location of a YouTube video playing on your site pulled in based on blog content!?! Yeah, we can do that.

APIs talking to APIs talking to APIs; all at the click of a button (or less). That’s a lovely conversation.