The API Stack Ranking

ProgrammableWeb has been adding new APIs to their directory at a dizzying speed.  John, Adam and the PW team have pioneered this space, bringing much needed awareness to the API industry, contributing significantly to its growth.  

As ProgrammableWeb approached 5,000 APIs I started putting a lot of thought into some way to rank APIs, and now that we've rolled over 8,000 APIs. 

To develop my ranking algorthm, I went through all the ProgrammableWeb APIs and graded them A,B,C and D based upon building blocks and business criteria I feel is important.  There are plenty of good ideas that don't have what I'd consider a complete implementation, which includes necessary support, resources, etc. With the right approach, they easily could get a higher grade.

After this grading, I continue to evalute APIs on several areas:

  • Internal effects - Quantity of tweets, blog posts and other activity by the API owner showing they are commited to supporting a developer community.
  • External Effects - Number of @mentions in social media, articles written about an API and other external influences that show an API is actively engaged with developers and marketing their platform.
  • Analyst - This is the "me" part of the algorthm.  Based upon my initial (and evolving) A,B,C,D grading.  Number of times I write about them, curated a companies tweets or blog posts.  Anything that shows I've paid attention to an API.

Using this methology, I created a way to automate ranking of APIs, that allows me to see APIs based upon internal and external influences as well as keeping in sync with my own opinions about which APIs are doing great things in the space.

I'm calling my ranking system, the API Stack. As my ranking system evolves, I will be adding and removing metrics, in an effort to provide a more real-time and relevant way of discovering and ranking APIs.

When I have the resources I'd like to add a legal layer to my ranking algorthm, allowing me to consider an APIs approach to terms of use, privacy, data portability, licensing, copyright, branding and other more legal effects.

Lot's of work ahead.